Becoming a Custody Nurse: The Ways That the Police Custody Nurse Identity Is Produced through Boundary Blurring

Nurses have been able to provide healthcare in police stations in England and Wales since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 2003, which allowed ‘healthcare providers’ to offer their services in police stations. Originally ‘police doctors’ were used, but a substitution has taken place over the following decade with a large proportion of constabularies now running a predominantly ‘nurse-led service’, often with the assistance of a doctor via telephone when necessary. This transition has taken place against a backdrop of increasing privatisation of healthcare provision in criminal justice with most constabularies contracting out to private companies. As a result, nurses working in police stations find themselves at the centre of a range of professional and contractual relationships that have the potential to challenge their nursing identity. In this paper I will demonstrate the ways that nurses negotiate these challenges to their professional autonomy and identity, and the ways that these challenges are actually constitutive to the custody nurse identity.

Drawing upon Carmel’s (2006) idea of ‘boundary-blurring’, I will show that the embedding of nurses within the police station and their regular work with the police has served to shape the professional identity of the custody nurse, in particular enabling them to balance the aims of criminal justice with the caring responsibilities of the nurse. At the same time, guidelines for custody nurse work, for instance Patient Group Directives designed by the employers, allow nurses a degree of autonomy, but in so doing also align the nurses’ interests with those of the company. To this end, this paper will show that the professional identity of the custody nurse is regularly produced in this liminal space between professional and contractual relationships, and rather than medico-legal professionals needing to emphasise one ‘role’ over another, such tensions are actually generative of their professional identity.