Norwegian Nurses’ Choice to Work with Alternative/Complementary Therapy: How Will This Affect Their Professional Identity?
This article discusses professional identity among Norwegian nurses who choose to work with alternative/complementary medicine. Ethnographic fieldwork among nurses who worked with alternative/complementary medicine showed that the nurses still called themselves nurses. They felt that they were “more nurses” as alternative therapists than they were as registered nurses employed in the Norwegian public healthcare service. They argued that increasingly it was possible to meet patients holistically and that they could focus on patients more as persons than medical diagnoses. They emphasized the importance of focusing the patients’ self-healing abilities as stressed by Florence Nightingale. Nurses who work with alternative/complementary medicine have a strong identity as nurses. Some of them felt they had come home to the heart of nursing.