The private clinic in Lethbridge, Alberta occupies a converted commercial building on a quiet street several blocks from the city's main hospital, its waiting room decorated with landscape prints meant to suggest calm and its back offices humming with the administrative apparatus of modern outpatient care. The registered nurse who has worked there for 6 years arrives each morning through the staff entrance, badges in with her proximity card, and begins her shift checking vitals, administering injections, and managing the steady flow of patients who come for chronic disease monitoring, minor procedures, and prescription renewals. She is in her early thirties, the mother of 2 young children whose photographs sit on her desk in the small office she shares with another nurse, and she has built a reputation among colleagues as competent, reliable, and unfailingly willing to take on extra shifts when the clinic is short-staffed. Her nursing license, issued by the College of Registered Nurses of Alberta, hangs in a frame on the wall of the clinic's main hallway alongside the credentials of the physicians and other healthcare professionals who practice there, a public assurance to patients that the people treating them have met Alberta's regulatory standards for professional competence and conduct.