Nurses under pressure : the demands of professional performance and their management through the use of medication

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between the demands on nurses’ professional performance and adherence to the use of medicines and supplements for their management. This approach allows us to analyze the transformations of nursing work and how nurses use various natural and pharmaceutical resources to cope with the pressures they face in their professional activities. To understand the interconnection between the transformations in nursing work and what we refer to here as the process of pharmaceuticalisation of work contexts, we use the results of a sociological mixed methods study on the use of medicines and food supplements for managing professional performance. The results show some of the main pressure factors in nursing work and how the increase in professional pressure substantially affects performance-related medicine use, as these become more frequent when nurses perceive their work as more intense, demanding, and exposed to risks.