ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the professional group whose history has been one of powerlessness and professional domination. Nurses are in a paradoxical situation since, as the largest professional group within the health care system, their voice for many years frequently was not heard. The chapter discusses that the strategies employed by nurses in the changed practice serve to maintain the status quo and result in a new manifestation of the traditionally asymmetric nurse-patient relationship. It explains the Hallidayan model of functional grammar to analyze the discourse and it demonstrates that the apparent dominance of the patient in the discourse does not in fact represent a shift in power from nurse to patient. The relationship of the patient with his circumstances can be more clearly demonstrated if we turn to another analytical scheme drawn from functional grammar, namely Ruqaiya Hasan's Cline of Dynamism.
