European Journal for Nursing History and Ethics; Fruzsina Müller, David Freis, and Pierre Pfütsch (Web)

Proposals by: 31.03.2024

The special issue (2025) aims to explore the relation between nursing and migration from different perspectives. The editors are seeking abstracts that will address historical and ethical issues pertaining to the topic of nurse migration, including the political, social and institutional contexts in which migrant nurses travel and work, their experiences as migrant nurses and their impact on both the nursing and the health system of their host country.
Staff shortages in nursing seem to be one of the constants in European health systems. As early as the 1950s, European states have found it necessary to recruit from abroad the qualified nurses and apprentices for the caring professions that were needed to mitigate a crisis in their health care systems. Since then the nursing shortages have only been reinforced by demographic changes and advances in health care. Today, through state-driven recruitment programmes, most developed countries employ a substantial number of migrant nurses, transforming the profile of nursing in Europe, North America and Australasia. Regular and irregular migration into formal and informal labour markets have played as much a role as the increasing care dependency on migrants in ageing societies. While some aspects of a migration history of nursing appear to be specific to the era of post-war globalisation, the entangled history of nursing and migration is considerably older, predating the modern profes-sionalisation of nursing.
Despite the obvious potentials of nursing history of migration and a migration history of nursing, the field is still largely underexplored. To date, historians of medicine and nursing in Europe have paid little attention to the relation of nursing and migration, and nor have scholars of migration history or contemporary history. Current historical research focuses on the multilayered marginalisation that migrants in the nursing profession experience. Due to an intersectional overlap of migration, gender and the social construction of nursing as a profession long considered as ancillary to medicine, migrant nurses could easily be overlooked by their nursing contemporaries and by later historians. Nevertheless, the gaps and desiderata are conspicuous, both because migration history and nursing history have become established and productive fields of historical inquiry in recent decades, and because the topic is evidently rele-vant to current and future debates about the related topics of population healthcare needs, workforce planning and nursing policy on training and recruitment. Read more and source … (Web)