Nursing Work, Family and Care Designing a Sustainable Workforce

Nurses routinely manage caregiving at home and at work with little structural support. Arguing that nursing will become safe and sustainable only when we design the profession around caregiving realities, this book pairs nurses' narratives with evidence and ready-to-use tools, reframing attrition and burnout as solvable design challenges across education, practice, and policy. This book presents a thoughtful new analysis of the tensions inherent in the way we currently organize the nursing workforce, where educational pipelines discourage students with dependents, managers struggle to retain postpartum staff and policies remain inconsistent across institutions. It begins by tracing the matrilineal roots of nursing and how colonial, gendered, and managerial logics produced the modern “ideal nurse.” Next, the discussion interprets the lived experience of the transition to motherhood within shift work, precepting, and leadership, illuminating hidden barriers to role enrichment through the challenges of nursing shiftwork and unpaid caregiving roles. Analysis then turns to systems: staffing models, scheduling, lactation and leave, professional standards, and how performance metrics penalize caregiving. The book directs readers to look forward through the viewpoints of caring masculinities, decolonial approaches to care, and an ethics-and-policy toolkit with checklists, sample policies, curricular modules, and measurement ideas leaders can adopt immediately. Providing a coherent framework for understanding how caregiver-workers are made invisible, this book reveals a vision for system change. It is an essential read for scholars and students interested in nursing, the organization of healthcare, carework, emotional labour, motherhood and work.