Nursing science at the University of Bergen rise 1979 - and clousure 2019/2020.

Abstract

The article describes and explains analytically the establishment and closure of the subject Nursing Science at the University of Bergen. Nursing Science was established there with a professorship in 1979. This was the first professorship of its kind in the Nordic countries. The Department of Higher Nursing Education was established accordingly. The university of Bergen has been the only place where nurses in Western Norway have had the opportunity to be educated in basic scientific theories, concepts and methods, and to graduate at master's and PhD level in theoretical studies of nursing. In 2019, the university closed the subject.

After a long period of planning in 1950’s and the concurrent establishment of the master programme, annihilation gradually took place from 2003, when Nursing Science went from being an autonomous subject with its own logic to becoming a field of study, and from being organized as a separate department to a degraded status as a section, later a “subject group”, until the field of study eventually disappeared completely when the department restructured the health subjects (nursing science, science of physiotherapy, genetic counselling, and more) to one joint study with several subject areas (in which nursing science and physiotherapy science were not included).

Nursing science has been decommissioned as an autonomous subject at the University of Bergen. The current offer is a master programme in “health and society”. The word science is no longer included in the title of the programme. In the current model, three health professional fields of study are maintained; genetic counselling, occupational hygiene, and manual therapy), whereas nursing science (established 1978/1979) and physiotherapy science (established 1991), which were established as autonomous academic subjects with their own logic have been closed. It seems clear that it is the fields of study that support the dominant major profession of medicine are maintained and developed at the University of Bergen.