Department of Biomedical and Public Health Ethics, Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, Krems, Austria.
Nurs Philos. 2023 Jan;24(1):e12388. doi: 10.1111/nup.12388. Epub 2022 Mar 31.
The nursing gaze, that is the specific ways of observing the patient in nursing practice, has been the object of ethical debates for decades. It has been argued that the specific feature of observing patients in nursing is the stereoscopic vision that allows nurses to see the patient at the same time as a subject and a body. However, with the increased use of technology in nursing and the focus on quantifiable biomedical data, some commentators see a shift from the view of the patient as subject to the patient as body, which results in a de-humanisation and objectification of patients. The new digital technologies in patient monitoring and surveillance add a further dimension to this topic. It is yet unclear how digital technologies affect the nursing gaze, and with it, nursing practice. Furthermore, the ethical implications of the digitally enhanced nursing gaze have yet to be analysed. It is the purpose of this study to make a first step in this direction. By focusing on digitally enhanced monitoring technologies in long-term care, these technologies are interpreted as liquid surveillance, an approach introduced by Zygmunt Bauman. The Baumanian concept of adiaphorisation, that is the detachment of social action from moral evaluation, is used as normative framework of the analysis. The analysis shows that the tendency to remove surveillance practices from moral evaluation by framing them as enablers of an active, healthy life and as tools for caring for the vulnerable, the stereoscopic vision of the nursing gaze is undermined.
护理凝视，即护理实践中观察患者的特定方式，几十年来一直是伦理辩论的对象。有人认为，在护理中观察患者的一个特定特征是立体视觉，它使护士能够同时将患者视为主体和身体。然而，随着护理中技术的广泛应用以及对可量化的生物医学数据的关注，一些评论家认为，对患者的看法从主体转向了身体，这导致了患者的去人性化和客体化。患者监测和监控的新数字技术为此主题增添了新的维度。目前尚不清楚数字技术如何影响护理凝视，以及护理实践如何受到影响。此外，数字增强型护理凝视的伦理含义尚未得到分析。本研究旨在朝这个方向迈出第一步。通过关注长期护理中的数字增强监测技术，这些技术被解释为液体监控，这是齐格蒙特·鲍曼（Zygmunt Bauman）引入的一种方法。鲍曼的中性化概念，即社会行为与道德评价的分离，被用作分析的规范框架。分析表明，通过将监控实践框定为积极、健康生活的推动者和弱势群体护理的工具，将其从道德评价中移除的趋势，破坏了护理凝视的立体视觉。
