IHPS Grand Rounds: For the Long Haul: The Pandemic’s Impact on Practice Orientations and Labor Relations for Registered Nurses
When it comes to the health care labor force, the pandemic continues to have a large impact. While many have documented its enduring impact on worker turnover and labor shortages, few have considered the change it may engender for providers and their practices. In this talk, LaTonya Trotter will use the experiences of registered nurses to consider the ways in which pandemic experiences were more than an acute stressor, but may portend changed understandings of what it means to be a nurse in terms of crafting a nursing a career and balancing competing obligations in the pursuit of being “a good nurse.”
LaTonya J. Trotter is an Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities within the University of Washington’s School of Medicine. As a sociologist, she takes an institutional view of ethics by considering how social and workplace institutions shape notions of responsibility and what constitutes “good” or ethical decisions by both health care professionals and lay providers of care. In considering how decisions around care get made, her work connects changes in the organization of medical work to the reproduction of racial, economic, and gender inequality. She takes up these and other questions in her book, More Than Medicine: Nurse Practitioners and the Problems They Solve for Patients, Health Care Organizations, and the State (Cornell University Press 2020), which was awarded the 2021 British Sociological Association’s, Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize.
Dr. Trotter’s publications have received awards sponsored by the American Public Health Association, the British Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the American Sociological Association. She is on the editorial boards of the journals Gender & Society and Contemporary Sociology, is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Organizational Sociology, and serves as a board member for the Johns Hopkins University Press’s Health Communication Series. She also serves on the Steering Committee of the Carework Network, an international organization of researchers, policymakers, and advocates striving to change the conversation around how we see, fund, and do care work.