S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

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points for deciding what information patients needed, what research should be pursued, and how patients were treated within the healthcare system’ (p. 292). In Australia similar trends are occurring with increasing policies, legislation and advocacy ensuring that mental health patients, as consumers, are consulted and help shape practices in the delivery of mental healthcare. This is not to naively suggest that each time a remote network, involving an obligatory passage point, that the patient is consulted. The effect on remote nurses, as obligatory passage points, is more from the angle of acting and caring in accordance with societal and legislative expectations. These expectations reflect the increasing influences of mental health consumer participation. Crosbie’s study (2014) examined the way in which nurses use and interact with technological machines in a hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. He reports that nurses become dependent on technology to deliver treatment regimens. Nurses create network arrangements whereby the machine and technology become obligatory passage points. ‘Moreover, whatever technology the patient’s condition calls for, the device operates as an obligatory passage point. It claims the attention of the nurses, and shapes the conditions of interaction’ (p. 239). The indispensability is such that the critically ill patient needs the treatment deliverable through the technology, and the nurses require the technologically, to deliver that treatment. Similarly, the profoundly mentally ill remote patient requires mental healthcare and the only group that can physically provide it, is remote nurses. In this situation remote nurses are the human equivalent to the status of technology in Crosbie’s study (2014). Like the technology in Crosbie’s study (2014), the remote nurse has become indispensable. Crosbie (2014) also found that the reliance on technology and how it shaped the nurse’s

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