Perceptions of Nurses by Health Professionals: A Sociological Perspective on Autonomy Discourse

Abstract

Initiatives to increase the professional autonomy of staff and transfer additional functions to them may be inhibited by the inert perception of nurses by colleagues as having a purely subordinate position in the hierarchy of medical work. The issue of the image of nursing staff (including the perception of nurses as exclusively "physician's assistants") in the Russian scientific literature is practically not represented in contrast to foreign ones; no all-Russian studies on this topic were found. This article analyses the image of nursing specialists among colleagues, with an emphasis on issues of the autonomy of nurses. The empirical background was the 2021 study, which interviewed 14,176 Russian health workers. Authors used quantitative analysis, content analysis of respondents' associations, as well as data science methods. The study showed a positive perception of nursing staff in general (72% positive associations). The image of a specialist is dominated by personal qualities (47% of associations) to the detriment of professional ones (24%), which may lead to an underestimation of their contribution to the work process. In general, there is a widespread attitude that a nurse is a doctor's assistant. The study found that less autonomous perceptions of nurses were associated with a more negative image of the profession as a whole. The findings suggest that legislative empowerment must be accompanied by addressing the perceptions of nurses within the health worker community.