The Loosening of Professional Boundaries and Restructuring: The Implications for Nursing and Medicine in Ontario, Canada*

This paper suggests that the combination of health care restructuring, legislation expanding, and redefining a regulated health profession in Ontario, Canada, has reduced medical dominance and increased managerial dominance of health care professionals. The paper focuses on nurses and doctors, and examines the effects of the Regulated Health Professions Act and the changes occurring within the health care system on their political, clinical, and economic autonomy. It argues that there has been a redistribution of power in the health care sector and suggests that the present autonomy of health care professionals is limited, and may be limited even further as the technical side of health care is prioritized over the indeterminate side.