This book presents a way of thinking about clinical inquiry, reasoning, judgment, and experiential learning in clinical practice. It illustrates the educational implications by providing a thick description of nurses’ thinking-in-action and reasoning-in-transition. The book provides a window to central areas of experiential learning required for the development of expertise in nursing practice. Throughout the book, numerous and varied suggestions and examples are provided to assist in the development of nurses toward expertise. Critical and acute care nursing practice is intellectually and emotionally challenging. The book describes two pervasive habits of thought and action in Chapters 2 and 3, clinical grasp and clinical forethought, and then nine domains of practice, in Chapters 4 through 12. While the fourth chapter provides a brief description of the clinical judgment and skillful interventions of excellent nurses as they manage the physiological functions of acutely and critically ill patients, the fifth illustrates how comforting patients forms a backdrop for clinical judgment. Encouraging family involvement in care-giving activities is an essential aspect of family care. Acute and critical care clinicians normally believe that patients who are dying should be admitted to palliative or hospice care. Chapter 11 describes the frontline system design and repair done daily by expert nurses, and chapter 12 presents a view of leadership based on directing and shaping excellent clinical practice. The last chapter presents pedagogical implications and uses of this work, both in schools of nursing and in practice settings.

This book is offered to hospice and palliative care nurses to assist their preparation for taking the Certified Hospice and Palliative Nurse (CHPN^®) certification examination. Interest in demonstrating expertise through certification as a hospice and palliative care nurse has continually grown, as recognition of one's expertise brings not only professional satisfaction but also personal pride. Since this text is a practice and certification review for hospice and palliative care nurses preparing for the CHPN certification examination, the book follows the test outline offered by the Hospice and Palliative Credentialing Center. In seven sections, the book offers tips on test-taking, an outline of the CHPN certification examination, a review of life-limiting conditions in adult patients, a review of pain and symptom management, a review of education and advocacy in patient and family care, a review of practice issues, and a full-length practice test with answers and rationales. It also presents practice questions at the end of the chapters. This must-have study guide for nurses seeking to obtain CHPN status provides state-of-the-art information about all aspects of this specialty. It features 300 carefully selected Q&As that offer a detailed rationale for each question, along with tips and strategies to promote exam mastery and frequently asked questions about the exam. Brief topical reviews address hospice and palliative care nursing practice in all of its dimensions, including physical, spiritual, and psychosocial. The resource highlights information that forms the basis of end-of-life care, such as communication and family-centered care. Additionally, the book covers high-level skills used by hospice and palliative care nurses, such as drug and dosage conversion and the use of infusion therapy.

This book delivers a wealth of practical tools for incorporating spirituality into nursing. There are numerous articles on the concepts of spirituality and religion in nursing practice, including the nursing role in spiritual assessment, spiritual nursing diagnoses, spiritual care in various nursing contexts, and many more. Spirituality is a focus for debate and discussion within the nursing profession, and it is appropriate to consider this concept as it has captured the nursing world. The book discusses an interrelationship between resilience and holistic health. It also discusses challenges to incorporating spirituality into nursing practice. Although there is ample rationale for the inclusion of spirituality into nursing practice, education, and research, there are also challenges to such inclusion. Some would identify these challenges as “barriers”, but the word “challenges” seems to have more potential for positive action with respect to exploring each challenge and ways to overcome it. In order to appropriately incorporate spiritual assessment and care into practice, nurses need the requisite professional competency. Competencies are integral to nursing practice and usually accompany standards of practice. Standards for educating nurses about spiritual care are present in both educational and practice contexts in that they are part of the accreditation criteria for institutions. The book also focuses on spiritual assessment and spiritual care within the context of mental health care/mental health nursing and spirituality in palliative and hospice care.

This book provides an overview of nursing professional practice models; their potential value to patients, nurses, and health systems; an orderly process of ensuring their translation into daily workflow; and the requisites for demonstrating their impact. It highlights the contribution that exemplary professional nursing practice can make to patients, families, professional nurses, and the health care system, given a systematic and thorough approach to its integration. The book is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the definition, value, and disciplinary need for professional practice models (PPMs), and includes practical steps required in preparation for model integration. The emphasis of Part II is eventual enculturation and it fulfills this purpose through repeated examples and exemplars, concentrating on the nurse–nurse leader relationship and associated strategies. Chapters deal with the importance of the chief nursing executive during the implementation of PPMs, usage of unit-level formative data, adoption of Quality-Caring Model and learning how PPM became a Magnet exemplar. Part III centers on sustaining the "transformed culture" and spreading PPMs through specific communication mechanisms, and special relationships and practices. This part of the book concludes with a chapter on creating impact— influencing change beyond the doors of a single organization—adding value, and building an impressive future. Examples and other resources are presented in the appendices.

This book presents a nursing practice guide to the neurologic examination. The information in this book is organized into two parts. The first part is dedicated to the neurological exam itself. The information provided here gives the reader a firm understanding of the preliminary assessment of the neurological patient. Chapters explore the need for history taking, evaluation of mental status, talk about the various cranial nerves, discuss the testing aspects of motor strength, sensation, reflexes and coordination. The evaluation of gait is a core component of a neurological examination. The sensory component of gait involves balance. The last chapter in this part covers imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) imaging and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electromyography (EMG). The second part of the book is dedicated to some of the more common symptoms that may be encountered in clinical practice. Understanding common etiologies, guidance on what questions and tests may be useful in an assessment of the disorder, and treatment options are detailed in these chapters. The various symptoms presented in this part are vertigo, tremor, low back pain, peripeheral neuropathy, weakness, dementia, diplopia, headache and gait disturbance.

The intent of this book is to provide useful knowledge and practical applications to ease the work of leading or working in a hospital-based nursing research program. It contains principles that apply to all sizes of hospitals, as well as hospital systems that may be spread out over multiple states or be contained in one area. The book describes how nursing research provides new evidence for nursing practice that improves clinical outcomes, changes the culture of the organization, creates new leadership roles for nurses, offers opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, enhances patient safety, improves nurse and patient satisfaction, and leads to positive branding of the hospital and the nursing department. Nursing leadership can create (or support) a vision for nursing research based on the benefits that are central to the hospital’s strategic mission and goals. An essential element of setting the foundation and planning, growing, and nurturing a nursing research program is to demonstrate how the program aligns with the strategic plan (vision, mission, and goals) of nursing. The three foundational elements of strong nursing research programs personnel, intranet resources, and a nursing research department database are interconnected and should be available to the entire nursing department, including non-nurse providers and administrators, because important research questions can come from anyone on the team. The nursing research department database is an electronic system of input and storage of direct and indirect data important to the development, conduct, translation, and dissemination of nursing research.

This book merges the full spectrum of Caring Science evolution and identifies a clear path for future growth and development. It provides an opportunity to experience the delicate space of praxis, as the examples of a living philosophy are made accessible to the reader. The book through personal narrative, exemplars, and discourses on Caring Science, helps the reader to understand the history, accomplishments, and vision of human caring as a serious ethical, ontological, epistemological, practical endeavor. Its intent is to create a compendium of cutting-edge literature related to Caring Science to inform and transform nursing practice. The book comprises 50 chapters and is structured with 10 sections, each focused on a particular theme. Section I assumes that nursing knowledge is evolving towards a unitary-transformative worldview, and the ontology of Caring Science is embracing the tenets of this unitary worldview. Section II describes explicit connections between established programs or initiatives and Caring Science. Section III discuses Caritas science literacy. Section IV is on caritas literacy as a foundation for nursing education. Section V focuses on how scholarly inquiry advances the epistemology of Caring Science in the areas of leadership, research, and education. Section VI explores epistemology of research, aesthetic knowing (healing environments), and Caritas Praxis. Section VII integrates Caring Science grounded in Watson’s Theory of Human Caring and the 10 Caritas Processes into large complex healthcare systems. Section VIII reflects the process of Caring Science and cross-cultural (transcultural) ethical significance that is being developed in many parts of the world. Section IX focuses on advancing disciplinary-specific knowledge grounded in a relational unitary worldview within the context of Unitary Caring Science. The final section focuses on how Caring Science can become a journey of personal and professional transformation engaging in aesthetic ways of knowing.

This book presents a conceptual framework for contemporary nursing practice based on the science of self-care and also incorporates other nursing and multidisciplinary perspectives. It illustrates how to attain and integrate knowledge from nursing theory and theories of related disciplines to achieve optimal evidence-based nursing practice. Case examples from a variety of clinical situations integrated with nursing theory demonstrate the variables needed to achieve optimal nursing practice. The first chapter discusses, inter alia, the relative value of different ways and patterns of knowing within the discipline of nursing. This is followed by a chapter that explains the importance of knowing and understanding the proper object of nursing. Nursing is an action system; action systems begin with problem identification, framing, and delineation. Several factors condition or influence the requirements for self-care, and represent a point of articulation of nursing sciences with other sciences that inform health-related situations. Self-care agency is developed as one learns from his or her family members and others in society to care for self. A traditional collaborative-care system is a unique whole that is formed through the informal or formal negotiation for care by two adults. The dependent-care agent is a person in a relationship not only with the care recipient but also with other members of the family. The family may be a factor that conditions the therapeutic self-care demand and self-care agency of the family member who is the identified patient.

This book is a history of nursing in the United States from 1607. It is intended as an introduction to nursing history for undergraduate and graduate nursing students and to others who might be interested in how the profession developed in the United States. The book uses examples of nursing education, nursing leadership, and changes in nursing practice throughout the narrative. The first chapter examines nursing care in the early Colonial period, Revolutionary War and post-Revolutionary period. The second chapter argues that nursing work changed to an organized system of “care by strangers” during the American Civil War. The third chapter describes creation of nurse training schools. Chapter 4 discusses formation of National Organization for Public Health Nursing, Children’s Bureau, and Rural Nursing Service of the American Red Cross. Fifth chapter focuses on the founding and development of first nursing organizations. Sixth chapter emphasizes the importance of innovation in nursing during the Progressive Era. Chapter 7 describes transition towards hospitals as the preferred place for treatment of illness. Eighth chapter describes the role of nursing during World War I and pandemic influenza of 1918. Ninth chapter explores the role of nurses to promote health of mothers and babies. Tenth chapter describes nursing during the Great Depression. Chapter 11 explores the opportunities and challenges of nursing during World War II. Chapter 12 discusses nursing shortage, and the impact of Hill-Burton funding on the rise of the modern hospital. Chapter 13 talks about the rise of coronary care nursing and its impact on nurses’ scope of practice, and military nurses’ work in the Vietnam War. The penultimate chapter describes the response of nurses to a number of national and international health crises such as HIV/AIDS emergency, nursing shortage, and the Persian Gulf War. The final chapter discusses nursing in the 21st century.

The completely revised fifth edition of Middle Range Theory for Nursing encompasses the most current middle range theories for graduate nursing students and researchers. User-friendly and consistently organized, it helps readers understand the connection of research to larger conceptual models in nursing. The fifth edition presents three new theories, a revised chapter on concept building, two published examples demonstrating the concept-building process, and a new section on the application of middle range theory that addresses its use for practice and education. Additional new features include the fresh perspectives of a third editor, a two-color design to enhance readability, and discussion questions concluding each chapter. The text describes sixteen middle range theories and elaborates on disciplinary perspectives, providing an organizing framework and evaluating the theories. Each theory is consistently organized by purpose, historical development, primary concepts, the relationships among concepts, and its use in nursing practice and research. Understanding of concepts is enhanced by the book’s use of the ladder of abstraction for each theory to explain its relationship to philosophical, conceptual, and empirical theory dimensions.