The Social Organisation of Health Visitor Training

Download or read book The Social Organisation of Health Visitor Training written by Robert Dingwall and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2014-01-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Dingwall's classic and original study of the training of health visitors (public health nurses) in the UK is now available in a convenient ebook edition, featuring linked chapter endnotes, all tables from the print edition, linked and detailed subject Index, and active Contents. The new digital edition adds a substantive, explanatory 2014 Preface by the author. This book has not been easily available in print for many years, but it has long been regarded as an important contribution to the study of professional socialization. It was one of the first studies to incorporate ideas from ethnomethodology into an ethnographic approach to studying health visitors, proposing that education should be thought of as the production of competence rather than the internalization of knowledge. The training programme is examined as an organization, to which both faculty and students contribute. This programme is also embedded in a wider set of social relations as the students -- predominantly women -- negotiate the place of their studies within the other demands on their lives in the context of the 1970s. In the process, the book reveals the efforts and possible success of the professionalisation process of this subset of medical service providers; its qualitative empiricism is a model for research that opens up the health visitor position (much like the "physician assistant" or PA in the US who travels to patients and implements the medical practice of a larger network) to a broader conceptualisation of its location in the medical profession.