The 'knowledgeable doer': nurse and midwife integration of complementary and alternative medicine in NHS hospitals

Drawing on the sociology of professions, this chapter examines how the integration of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) provided a space for hospital based nurses and midwives to enhance their occupational jurisdiction. In this regard CAM is implicated in the professional projects of the practitioners although the relationship is a complex one. Policy developments since the late 1980s had promoted the idea of the nurse/midwife as a ‘Knowledgeable doer’ - a practitioner with independence and responsibility. In this context, CAM provided a domain in which practitioners could not only exercise some autonomy but also reclaim feminised aspects of their practice which they feared had been lost. However, long-standing gendered power relations within health care, the uncertain status of CAM, changes in governance, and the relationship between femininity and professionalisation, together limited the success of their project.