Abstract
The purpose of the study is to uncover whether the changes in young people's apprehension of challenges of work and self-identity in the late Modernity forces its way through their narratives. The study describes the viewpoints of nearly graduated nurses regarding problematic nursing situations. The material consists of narratives from the final papers from the Danish School of Nursing in Odense 1999–2000 (n=106). Hermeneutic reading leads to three themes chosen by the advanced beginners as being a special challenge to them: ‘The patient who wants to do things in opposition to the nurse’, ‘the patient who will not do his own good’, and ‘the poorly accomplished clinical agency’. The young nurses are anxious to inspire trust despite the patient's situation being uncertain and risky. In clinical decisions they have a self-perspective, and fight with difficulties trusting their own judgment based on weak paternalism. The young nurses want to take fully responsibility on all of it, maybe as a way of strengthening their feeble ontological feeling of security while performing their role in the expert system. The young nurses seem to have an ideological understanding of their relations with the patient, and they are left with a conflict of responsibility. The fundamental value of respecting the patient's autonomy seem to give the young nurses in the study a reality shock meeting the real-life-patient, who wants to do things differently.