Responsibility in health care: regarding the time we live as intensive care nurses

Abstract

This qualitative investigation was supported by Foucault's analysis with emphasis on the notion of governability, and had the following objectives: to analyze the relationship between techno-biomedicine and bioethics as discourses of the contemporaneousness implied in the production of nurses' subjectivity within the context of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU); and approach the responsibility implied in health care as one of the unfolding strategies of technology of speech of bioethics and biotechnology, creating certain forms of the nurse understanding and intervening in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). From the perspective of the multiple ways that can emerge when analyzing a critical reading of analyzed texts and interviews with nurses, responsibility in health care was unfolded into categories that expressed the responsibility in front of new languages and of nursing as a guardian of certain attributes in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).