Patient or customer?

This paper investigates caring in practice within the context of the global imperative of increasing rationalisation of care based on an economic ethic. The notion of the global marketplace has spread to the domain of health services, so that 'health' has come to be seen as a commodity, with the body as its site, and the 'patient' a customer; clinicians work to construct standard pathways through the healthcare supermarket. The challenge for nurses is to work within but also to challenge and resist the reductionist impetus of economically based and commercially driven approaches to health care. They must retain the sense of the value of the wholeness of the person, the deeply personal and profoundly significant professional-recipient relationship, and find ways of demonstrating their capacity to deliver high-quality care in a cost-effective way. Proper and appropriate accountability is a key strategy to maintaining quality nursing as a significant aspect of care. The expansion of the role of the advanced practice nurse is very useful in providing holistic and cost-effective care, though there are currently limitations to scope of practice that need to be removed. The metaphor of the marketplace, underpinned by powerful global economic forces, can draw us into unthinking compliance with its imperatives--but other metaphors are available. Metaphor and creativity are linked, and we need to consider how the creative use of language can facilitate the emergence of new ways of understanding in health care.