Health, Disease, and Causal Explanations in Medicine

Book reviezvs 109 power they deserve as professionals and to exercise it individually, collectively and in concert with other professionals to promote better and more cost- effective health care for all persons, especially those who have least access to it'.The position taken in these papers is that if nurses are to act in a professional way they must have the power to enable them to do so.The nurse's role is said to be that of patient advocate within the complex organisational settings of health care.Nurses have responsibilities to patients, to the organisation and, if professional status is to be achieved and sustained, to their professional association.In trying to respond to these responsibilities, the nurse encounters ethical issues and may be faced with moral dilemmas.Thompson's paper, Conflicting Loyalties of Nurses Working in Bureaucratic Settings, addresses these ethical issues.The paper centres on the case of a mother who asks to hold her baby (after a normal delivery) and is met with some unwillingness on the part of the nurse, who wants to weigh the baby and place it in the 'warmer'.The questions Thompson raises from this everyday type of situation are 'How is it that child-bearing women have to ask if