Florence Nightingale, Nursing, and Health Care Today

This book is addressed to nurses, administrators, nursing academics, nursing students, as well as other health care professionals, and to the interested general reader. Nightingale was far ahead of her time in setting out the core principles of the new nursing profession, with demanding ethical standards and continuing education to keep up with best practice. The book is organized into two parts containing twelve chapters. Part I, Nightingale’s Nursing: Then and Now, presents what she wrote and did in key areas of nursing and health care: patient care, health promotion, ethics, infection control, pediatric nursing, long-term and palliative care, administration, and research and policy development. Part II, In Nightingale’s Own Words, takes the reader into Nightingale’s best writing itself. It provides selections of Nightingale’s most important writing from 1858 to 1893, thus facilitating the tracing of her ideas as they evolved. Nightingale’s writings are categorized into Nightingale’s early writing on hospitals and nursing, Nightingale’s writing on nursing for the poorest, and Nightingale’s late writing on nursing, hospitals, and disease prevention. The book shows how Nightingale interacted with leading physicians and other health science experts. The prime purpose of this book is to bring Nightingale’s ideas and work to the attention of nurses today, not as a historical figure but as a source of principles, vision, and sound practice in the here and now.