Abstract
The health establishment has gradually become a care company, with all the economic and managerial characteristics that this entails. The essential place of “the ethics of care” is greatly disturbed by the taking into account of performance considerations that are now essential. The very notion of performance remains debated, for lack of a unambiguous approach the structures are exposed to paradoxical injunctions. The normative framework only imperfectly fulfills its role of regulation as the successive legal regimes lack coherence. The objectives addressed to health professionals are imposed without an overall logic being able to emerge. Reconciling, even reconciling, the notions of ethics of care and performance of the activity proves to be an imperative necessity. The use of the norm, in its functions of organization and arbiter, makes it possible to approach the issues and logics of the confrontation from an angle that has not yet been explored.