The Informal Power of Nurses for Promoting Patient Care

There is a large body of literature devoted to physicians' abilities to communicate effectively regarding medical interventions. However, nurses’ use of a variety of communicative techniques to advocate appropriate patient care effectively has gone largely unexamined. Although a great deal of formal power in the distribution of healthcare resides with organized healthcare systems, clinical administration, and physicians, nurse participants in this study demonstrated they communicatively exercised informal power strategies in the performance of their role as patient advocates. This study is a qualitative analysis of the narratives of six registered nurses, gathered over a six month period of time, which reveals the ways nurses influenced the outcomes of patient care through their use of the informal power available to them. The narratives of these nurses revealed how they were able to draw on informal power to manage both organizational and also hierarchical constraints in order to advocate for proper patient care.