58

The predictable shortage of nursing staff, in Switzerland as in the rest of Europe, continues to highlight a recurring problem for public health policy. The issue here relates not just to questions about the care and treatment of patients or the quality of such care, but also about the conditions necessary for adequate staff recruitment and the long-term professional engagement of health care personnel. Training in nursing care at universities of applied sciences in western Switzerland is also indirectly affected by rationalization measures currently in force in the public health sector. The training context affords a valuable opportunity for assessing the tensions between two types of logic: that of professionalization based on the rationality of economics, and that of professional development, understood as the construction of the subject in his/her professional activity. The results of our research demonstrate the existence of fields of tension, encountered by students, between their process of professionalization and their emerging professional development, tensions that also impact on the other pillars of professionalization that are engagement, motivation, and recognition. This qualitative study was based on biographical interviews and an analysis of portfolios, professional projects, and internship reports (evaluation of skills and competences by professionals), with a cohort of forty-three students studying for a bachelor of science in nursing, in their third year of training in Switzerland and Belgium.