As a nurse in the beginning of my professional career I confront myself everyday with efforts of my work pairs to gain recognition from the lay people and also from the health staff in general. In fact, the nursing science has been trying to demark its knowledge and action field from other occupations and professions, particularly from medical profession. Nurses have developed many strategies to establish their knowledge as unique and also to define themselves as autonomous and independent professionals. Using the scientific knowledge is one of those strategies to achieve the professional autonomy. However, two positions regarding this strategy should be enlightened: one concerning how the scientific knowledge could lead to nursing professional autonomy and other about how the same strategy could strengthen the dependence to medical model. In this presentation I try to discuss this question from the inside with a theoretical approach using the contributions of sociology of professions addressing the Portuguese reality.

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• Sociology - Social Sciences