Reporting therapeutic discourse in a therapeutic community

Abstract

Research in nurses' communications has concentrated on nurse to patient interactions. Those few studies which focus on nurse to nurse communications seem to be generated by a pragmatic and normative concern with effective information sharing. In this paper, which describes one aspect of a larger case study of a hospital-based therapeutic community, the description and analysis of nurses' reports flows not from a normative model of professional practice, but rather an exploration of how professional practice is articulated as discourse in nurses' written accounts. Foucault's ideas about therapeutic discourse inform the theoretical framework of the research. Ethnomethodological concerns with the importance of documentary analysis provide the methodological rationale for examining nurses' 24-hour report documents, as official discourse, reflecting therapeutic practice in this setting. A content analysis of nurses' reports, collected over a period of 4 months, demonstrated the importance of domesticity and ordinary everyday activities in nurses' accounts of hospital life. Disruption to the ‘life as usual’ domesticity in the community seemed to be associated with admission to and discharge from the hospital when interpersonal and interactional changes between patients occur. It is suggested that nurses in general hospital wards and more orthodox psychiatric settings might usefully consider the impact of admissions and discharges on the group of patients they manage, and make this a discursive focus of their work.