Producing Skilled Nurses: Education Programs in an Indian Corporate Hospital

Abstract

India’s private healthcare industry is rapidly growing and becoming more technologically advanced, resulting in a high demand for skilled nurses. In nursing, experience is of central importance to master not only the needed medical and technical knowledge (techne) but also patient handling and spontaneous problem-solving skills (mêtis). Additionally, the high work pressure demands an extraordinary degree of dedication of the workforce. Corporate hospitals struggle with a high turnover rate among nurses which ensures a constant shortage of staff and a large proportion of new and very young nurses with little or no work experience. As a reaction, they have developed extensive in-house education programs for nurses.
Based on seven months of ethnographic field research in a large corporate hospital in Kolkata, I approach the issue of skilling through an examination of the nursing induction program with its practices of skilling and underlying ideas of skill. In the discourse among nurses and other health professionals, the ambiguous notion of care is central to reflect and evaluate the broad range of skills and attitudes that are required. I show how this ubiquitous and highly moralized language of care, that has a long history in nursing, is used to categorize skill and to articulate a work ethos that reflects the wider social and economic context in which young people opt for nursing as a profession and the local dynamics of the labor market and the challenges of the hospitals.