Academic Nursing’s “Killer Elite” and the Social Science Pablum Behind It – The Daily Sceptic
The Jason Arday scandal raises wider questions about academic standards, argues Dr Ann Bradshaw, who says nursing embraced social science pablum over medical rigour – and was always about power, not patient care.
3 min readI read Professor Watson’s interesting memory ofPenny Prophit, and his comparison of her to Jason Arday. I too have a memory of Penny Prophit, whom I met when she examined my nursing doctoral thesis. This originated in my own scepticism of the newly academicised UK nursing. In order to question the rigour of this supposed ‘body of nursing knowledge’ I had to become academically familiar with it. This led me into publishing several books and numerous articles on my concern that much of this new nursing scholarship was based not on medical sciences (which would make sense) but on social sciences. And it was not being subjected to proper scrutiny. UK ‘academic’ nursing found its way into the universities via education departments, just as Jason Arday did. It adopted social science methodologies, such as ethnography, phenomenology, lived experience, reflective practice, grounded theory and action research. These were used as justification for funding nursing university departments, nursing doctoral theses, nursing professorships and hence nursing’s political activism for the past four decades, keeping out any critical scrutiny as disloyalty. Indeed I found UK nursing journals rejected my articles, so I published in theLancet, theBritish Medical Journal,Social Science and Medicine,Journal of Medical Ethicsand North American nursing journals instead. I may have been a lonely sceptic in the academy, but I was not with my practical nursing colleagues on the wards who also questioned the value of this new academic nursing for care of patients. A few years ago, just before I retired, I replied to an editorial inJournal of Advanced Nursing(edited by Professor Watson), which, to my surprise, admitted that academic nursing was being hampered, even sabotaged, by a mediocre ‘killer elite’. My submission was rejected (by Professor Watson as he later told me) so I published it in theTimes Higher Educationinstead. As for Penny Prophit, she defended herself against what she described as distorted claims. She was praised by the Scottish Office, and sued the BBC for defamation in what became a seminal case. The BBC settled out of court. She died in 2021, so cannot defend herself against Professor Watson’s claims. It seems to me that the Jason Arday scenario helpfully exposes the psychodynamic pablum of much social science research. And it is that so-called scholarship, which nursing has adopted, that should be under the spotlight. Social science research, even carried out conscientiously, has major flaws: researcher bias, subjectivity, low generalisability, lack of validity and reliability, too much variability, and indeed what Richard Dawkins calls “gobbledygook”. And it is very questionable, as the Francis Report in 2013 highlights, whether nursing research has actually contributed to higher levels of nurse recruitment and staffing or improved the quality of patient care. But then moving nurse training out of hospital apprenticeship into polytechnics and then universities was never really about improving patient care. It was always about power: improving the status of nursing by creating an academic elite. Dr Ann Bradshaw SRN is a retired Senior Lecturer in Adult Nursing at Oxford Brookes University. Her previous books includeThe Nurse ApprenticeandThe Project 2000 Nurse.