The Na？ve nurse: revisiting vulnerability for nursing

The purpose of this paper is to examine nursing contributions to the concept of vulnerability and consider how a broader perspective that includes socio-political dimensions may assist nurses to reach beyond the immediate milieu of the patient into the dominant social, political, and economic structures that produce and sustain vulnerability.By broadening nurse’s conceptualization of vulnerability, nurses can obtain the consciousness needed to move beyond a peripheral role of nursing that has been dominantly situated within institutional settings to contribute in the larger arena of social, economic, political and global affairs.