Alexis Bosque ENC 1102 Nursing Shortage Amy Devitt writes that genres are not defined merely as a list of containers or constraints to shape our communication but also “develop…because they respond appropriately to situations that writers encounter repeatedly” (Devitt, p. 576). When communicating with those in the discourse communities we belong to, it is important to analyze the genres that exist within that context in order to gain a sense of how to appropriately respond. “Genre entails purpose, participants, and themes, so understanding genre entails understanding a rhetorical and semiotic situation and a social context” (Devitt, pp. 575-576). New notions of genre are ones where genre allows us to respond more quickly and efficiently to a variety of social contexts without searching for a rubric to guide us. Genres, therefore, are commonalities of thought that allow us to be more adept at responding to the social situations in which we find ourselves. Based on this definition, genre is not merely a system by which we classify the texts we come across or determine what constitutes good writing. Genre does not focus only on the effects of but also the source of communication. Genre analysis relates to any specialized field because it help you to learn how to respond to the context of the specialty. I am entering the college of nursing soon so I’m interested in studying the discourse community of nursing. Genre analysis is important in nursing especially in emergency care settings. Having an understanding of the meanings of words used by nurses is crucial for any patient care. Genre analysis would also be valuable if I go into publishing my
own articles to be read by other nurses or if I do research. The following articles are samples of the types of genres within my field.
Setting: The articles I chose to study pertain to the nursing shortage (or soon to be shortage). I accessed them using the UCF library database, which led me to the search engine titled “CINAHL.” CINAHL is the world’s most comprehensive nursing and allied health research database. Among the more than 770 journals indexed in CINAHL are topics ranging from nursing to biomedicine to health sciences. For this reason, I searched within CINAHL for all my articles except the one in “The Lamp.” Publications within the field of nursing are also accessible via sources such as the American Nurses’ Association (ANA), American Association of CriticalCare Nurses (AACN), and National League for Nursing (NLN), among many others. Mass media outlets such as journalism and broadcast also publish about the field of nursing, although those sources are not always the most reliable or insightful. Currently, a topic of major interest in nursing is the nursing shortage and the various proposed ways to counteract it. An article of pertinence to my subject of study is “Investing in Human Capital: An Academic-Service Partnership to Address the Nursing Shortage.” It is written by Rebecca Culver Clark and Lisa Allison-Jones and was published in the January-February 2011 issue of the journal “Nursing Education Perspectives.” Other articles published in that particular issue include “Assessing Faculty Integration of Adult Learning Needs in SecondDegree Nursing Education,” “Preparing the Nurse Scientist for Academia and Industry,” and “Advancing Nursing Education Science: An Analysis of the NLN’s Grants Program.” Although I
did not use the last three articles in my genre analysis, a trend of education and scholarship in nursing can be seen based on the titles. Hoping to gain more diversity in the types of solutions to the nursing shortage, I searched for an article that did not belong to a journal focusing on education within nursing. “Shortage of OHNs to Emerge as RNs retire” was published in January 2012 in “Hospital Employee Health.” Articles included in this monthly publication deal with clinical, administrative, or regulatory issues related to the care of hospital employees. This article is more technical in nature, as its intended audience is hospital staff or people who have in-depth knowledge on how hospitals are managed. “Is the DNP the Answer to the Nursing Faculty Shortage? Not Likely!” was published in the 2010 October/December edition of “Nursing Forum: An Independent Voice for Nursing.” The piece is written by Karen Kelly. Other titles of articles published in that issue include “The Future of Baccalaureate Degrees for Nurses” and “Combat-Related Blast-Induced Neurotrauma: A Public Health Problem?” From the titles, you can observe how this forum is more diverse in the scope of issues it addresses within nursing. Similar to the previous article is “Action Pledged on Nurse Shortage,” which was published in the December 2011-January 2012 edition of “The Lamp” by an unstated author. I found this article by searching on Google.com for a nursing association that I had not previously heard of. One that I came across was the New South Wales Nurses’ Association’s (NSWNA) publication called “The Lamp.” Although the nursing organization is based out of Australia and I probably won’t move there any time soon, I chose it so that I could better familiarize myself with
the diversity of groups within nursing. The other articles that were published in “The Lamp” appeared to focus on specific nursing issues in the area (in this case, Australia). Nurses access information about their fields from a variety of nursing organizations, groups, and forums. They vary in genre presentation based on whether the audience is strictly nurses or also inclusive of non-nursing specialists. Also, because of the variation of degrees nurses hold and their levels of education, some articles are written more formally than others. Subject: In the early 2000s, there were national efforts made to address the nursing shortage. One of which was to increase the number of practicing nurses “through the use of sign-on bonuses and travel nurses” (Clark & Allison-Jones, 2011). However, this solution proved only to be shortterm. Many of the long-term issues of nursing arise from a lack of higher nursing education. Many colleges are experiencing problems with increasing student enrollment, having a shortage of qualified faculty, and difficulty establishing clinical sites needed to support more students (Clark & Allison-Jones, 2011). There are two main proposals to counter the nursing shortage. Karen Kelly’s “Is the DNP the Answer to the Nursing Faculty Shortage? Not Likely!” makes its position on the debate known right from the title. Kelly does agree that the key to ending the shortage is to increase the number of higher-educated faculty members, but she says that the proposed Doctoral Nursing Program (DNP) will not be the only answer. Although this program would provide a PhD for nurses that surpasses the old master’s degree programs, she provides the following data in her rebuttal of the DNP as the saving grace of the shortage. “This assumption of higher levels of education among faculty resulting in higher salaries seems to be contradicted by the AACN’s
own information on faculty salaries and a 2009 survey on nurse practitioner (NP) salaries (Rollet, 2009). While this fall 2009 survey of 5,908 NPs indicated that doctorally prepared NPs, who held any doctoral degree, earned a mean salary of $99,070, NPs in academic positions earned a mean salary of only $81,552. Of the 22 practice settings for NPs noted in the salary survey, academia ranked the twentieth” (2010, p. 268). This means that in 2009, nurse practitioners holding a PhD earned an average of $17,518 more per year if they worked in a clinical setting than an academic one. Kelly then begs the question, why would nurses choose to be teachers for significantly less pay? And if they choose to go into clinical practice, then how can the nursing shortage be countered by the introduction of higher nursing education incentives? Another viewpoint on how to turn around the nursing shortage is to provide higher education for current nurses and tuition advancement programs (TAP) to accommodate those students. “As regulations in healthcare increase, there is also an increase in demand for skills in nurses. Therefore, the level of education required is also increasing” (Hospital Employee Health, 2012). Yet a third solution, as proposed by the New South Wales Nurses’ Association is to close beds in hospitals until new nurses are hired. This is a local issue discussed by the Australian nursing group but also encompasses issues in America of understaffed hospitals in rural areas.
Participants: The articles I studied are geared towards an audience of health-care professionals or those wishing to learn about the future need for nurses. As I mentioned earlier, the article by Clark and Allison-Jones is published in a journal called “Nursing Education Perspectives,” which is a
bimonthly publication of the National League of Nursing (NLN). According to the NLN, this journal “provides an evidence base for best practices and a form for the exchange of information regarding teaching and learning, curricula, technology, the recruitment and retention of students, and other issues important to nursing education.” Considering the importance of education in regards to the nursing shortage, this publication is very relevant as it addresses the fundamental underlying issues behind the lack of higher-educated faculty in nursing. Health Employee Hospital points out the need for specialized training after nursing school. Many of its readers are nurses, healthcare professionals, or hospital management staff. This is due to its use of technical language and lack of explanation of abbreviations such as OHN (occupational health nurse) and the use of data tables with little explanation as to what trends they are describing. “Thirty or so years ago teaching was the most likely career option for those completing graduate work in nursing. In my own graduate class of 10 in the mid-70’s, at least 7 went into teaching positions during the first year or two after completing their graduate degrees in nursing.” This is an excerpt from Karen Kelly’s publication on “Nursing Forum: An Independent Voice for Nursing.” In this quote we can see her use of personal anecdote to draw comparisons about why there is a faculty shortage in nursing now. She later tells how she used to be a dean at a Midwest college but left in 1988 because she could increase her salary by 61% if she took a nursing administration position. Considering that this is a nursing forum that focuses on opinions different from the norm and has a looser structure than journals, it makes sense why this publication is more lax in diction and formalness. Similar to this article is the one from “The Lamp,” which is the journal from the NSWNA. It presents a story of one hospital in particular
and the struggles it’s experiencing with the present shortage of nursing staff. This journal is read by both nurses and non-nurses so the use of local stories, which are more easily relatable, makes sense.
Features: One of the recurrent themes that most of the articles shared was a simplification of the genre involved. Except for the article published in “Hospital Employee Health,” most articles presented terms and then explained them so that non-nurses and non-healthcare specialists could understand. This is probably due to the amount of research into the subject of the nursing shortage by non-nurses looking at the field as a potential route to a job. Especially in a less-thanperfect economy, when people hear about any amount of job openings, an interest in them is bound to occur. The lack of highly complex diction could help to attract more to the field. Most articles were presented in APA style with an abstract introducing the paper, but others, such as “Investing in Human Capital: An Academic-Service Partnership to Address the Nursing Shortage,” put the abstract in the paper but at the bottom of the first page. It served as a divider between the start of the first paragraph in a subsection and the rest of it on the next page. This may indicate what kind of audience is reading about nursing shortages. The topic itself focuses more so on a social/educational aspect of nursing rather than a science-oriented one, so the authors may have altered the article to suit a different type of reader while still attempting to preserve APA format. Laura Martinez 7/8/12 3:21 PM Good discussion
Patterns:
The discourse community of nursing is full of cultural and educational backgrounds and so lends to a genre that is equally diverse. Research papers within nursing are more formal and are filled with technical language that is more difficult to understand for the non-nurse. Genre analysis of forum publications within nursing reveals a less serious approach to topics in nursing. Forums also tend to be freer in opinion and can provide very different perspectives into the issues. Similarly, “The Lamp” is anecdotal and relates to nurses as well as everyday readers. Its anecdotal evidence isn’t always representative of the whole of the community’s issues but can give the reader greater insight by making the issues relatable. It’s important to note the diversity of communication within the field of nursing because it makes it that much more important to study the whole of the discourse community and understand how to respond within various groups. Readers of this genre have to understand to some extent the technical jargon of nursing, especially the different types of nurses and the different fields within nursing.