ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on several perplexing problems that beset Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training Institute's (PPI) nurses. Each problem inevitably involves both the institutional setting and its psychiatrists, often simultaneously. Perhaps nurses are also more vulnerable than psychiatrists because they operate with a minimum of psychiatric knowledge. The chapter underlines briefly what problems confront the various nurses and psychiatrists at PPI as they work together. The nurses would not consider themselves psychiatric nurses unless their work also included therapeutic action. Nurses had much less authority and consequently found themselves acting as buffers between irate attending physicians and central administration. Two of the repetitive administrative problems arise from the ambiguity surrounding the nurses' administrative and managerial authority and the potential of psychiatric wards for eruption into sudden "emergencies". Nurses had much less authority and consequently found themselves acting as buffers between irate attending physicians and the central administration.
