This book is written for faith community nurses (FCNs) and provides information and resources necessary to be successful in the practice of faith community nursing. This specialty nursing practice combines the caring aspect of nursing with the spiritual and the sacred. The book is divided into three parts. Part I provides an overview of faith community nursing practices its roots, practice models, roles, and legal and ethical parameters. Faith community nursing is the specialized practice of professional nursing that focuses on the intentional care of the spirit as part of the process of promoting holistic health and preventing or minimizing illness in a faith community. Parish nursing is a recognized specialty practice that combines professional nursing and health ministry. Health care practitioners who make several small changes in how patients’ religious commitments are broached in clinical practice may enhance health outcomes. There are four models through which faith community nursing practice is delivered: the institutional model, the congregational paid model, the congregational volunteer model, and the paid consortium model. Part II includes chapters that inform the FCN about initiating a faith community nursing ministry, assessing the health needs of the faith community, health education, teaching, and program planning and evaluation. Part III presents information on meeting the special needs of the faith community and includes content on acute and chronic care needs, palliative care, and grief and loss. Additional chapters focus on connecting with community resources and vulnerable populations.

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 presents a framework for nursing to build and, ultimately, sustain partnerships. Exemplar case studies written by nurses working in global health follow each chapter to illustrate specific elements of a strong partnership. The guiding principle for the book is that partnerships are paramount in creating sustainable outcomes. Varying degrees of partnership integration can include coordination, cooperation, and close collaboration. No matter their degree of partnership, nurses are ethically and morally obliged to be concerned with the world’s suffering. The book begins with a chapter which discusses types of existing partnerships and how nurses make the selection of an appropriate program to begin a partnership. Chapter 2 addresses how cultural perspectives, personal attributes, expectations, and knowledge of host country influence a volunteer nurse’s experience. In the third chapter, nursing roles in host country are addressed, community assessment as essential knowledge is highlighted. The importance of nursing licensure, mutual respect, and partnership is also dealt with. Chapter 4 presents examples of nurses’ experience with volunteers or partners, differences in the scope of practice between nursing partners, and the role of the nurse and nursing profession in host countries. This is followed by chapter which emphasizes the importance of resources, whether human, material, or financial, which are essential in developing a partnership. Two other chapters discuss important aspects of collaborative nursing research in international settings and explore the elements of sustainability to address the leadership required to maintain the partnership.

This book presents firsthand accounts from nurses at all professional levels, who share their life-changing experiences and insights with nurses interested in the global health arena. Their stories emphasize the practical, challenging, and rewarding aspects of global health nursing. The nurses describe their motivation for working in global health, along with the rewards and challenges. They discuss the importance of approaching global nursing with humility, respect, and appreciation for what they will learn from their colleagues. They describe how global health work has enhanced their ability to provide quality care to diverse populations, which include recent immigrants living in the United States. In addition to these vivid accounts, the book discusses the parameters of global health nursing, how to prepare for this nursing experience, key resources, global nursing research, and nurses as global health consultants. Woven throughout the book are descriptions of how these nurses have encouraged―through teaching and mentoring―the next generation of global health nurses. The book also provides coverage of domestic global health initiatives, and assists faculty to prepare themselves and their students for global health endeavors. The book is written for nurses at all stages of professional life.

Nursing theory and practice intertwine in a mutually supportive bootstrapping process as the nursing graduate develops skill. A theory must be a new whole in which decontextualized elements are related to each other by rules or laws. It seems that it is more plausible to believe that sufficient experience, accompanied by no theoretical knowledge, could produce skilled coping behavior. The study of the skill-acquisition phenomenon has shown that a person usually passes through at least five stages of qualitatively different perceptions of their task as skill improves. Performance improves to a marginally acceptable level only after the novice has considerable experience coping with real situations. While this encourages the advanced beginner to consider more objective facts and use more sophisticated rules, it also teaches the learner an enlarged conception of what is relevant to the skill. A more subtle and refined discrimination ability is what distinguishes the expert from the proficient performer. It is our hope that we have put into words once again what nurses and all clinicians know in their practice and that the marginalized caring practices presented here compel the reader to consider the societal worth and knowledge inherent in the caring, diagnostic, and therapeutic work that nurses do. As well, it is our hope that practitioners from other fields will join us in this conversation so that together we can design better institutions of public caring—in our schools, families, social work, courtrooms, and in all places where protection of vulnerability, sponsorship of growth, and the promotion of better citizenship occurs. The synthesis of the work on the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is drawn from Benner (2005).

This book describes and analyzes nurses’ roles in select cases from disasters that have occurred in areas around the world from the late 19th century to the present. These include an outbreak of typhoid in Tasmania in 1885 to 1887; a devastating earthquake in Italy in 1908; an Ohio (USA) flood in 1913; the Alaskan influenza epidemic of 1918; the World War II bombings of London and Manchester, England, in 1941; the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941; the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945; a destructive wild fire in Bar Harbor, Maine (USA), in 1947; the SARS crisis in Toronto, Canada, in 2003; and the effects of Hurricane Sandy on hospitals in New York City (USA) in 2012. Nurses’ actions are situated within local responses, national networks, and international aid. Nurses are a critical part of disaster response, and the book gives them a voice. Themes that recur throughout the narrative are: the notion of a nurse’s “duty to care” versus the need to protect herself or himself; the need for innovation and coordination of the response effort; and cooperation among the responders versus inherent political, racial, and interprofessional conflicts. Thus, the book examines political sensitivities, international conflicts, cultural differences, and societies’ varying professional and gendered expectations of nurses. In addition, the book highlights nurses’ voices during major World War II bombings, addressing realities that occurred during the war that have long been silenced for reasons of political and social correctness. These case studies document nurses’ roles in response to the London Blitz, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the bombing of Hiroshima, revealing nurses’ response to these crises: their dedication to patients, their ability to triage and improvise, and their adaptation to nursing professional norms expected in various cultures.

This book is devoted to a discussion of the native American Indian health system and nursing. It is divided into three parts. Part I first provides a national and historical look at the peoples of what is now the United States. This is followed by a view of pre- and postcontact indigenous America and the effects on health resulting from policies by the new dominant culture. Next to be introduced is the idea that “nursing” has been occurring in indigenous America long before icons, such as Florence Nightingale, put a face to the profession. An introduction to nursing and the Indian Health Service (IHS) is then followed by health modalities outside of the IHS that is, indigenous knowledge and traditional healing. Part II shows how these experiences are/were played out in the various cultural regions of the United States: Northeastern Woodlands; Southeastern Woodlands; Southwest tribal regions; Great Basin; Indians-habitated California; Pacific Northwest; Alaska; and Northern Great Plains. Urban has been added to the regional groups found in the 48 contiguous states and Alaska. In Part III, the reader explores funding as a major component of increasing care options and access in Indian country. Two chapters discuss the issues of Indian health funding and American Indian nursing education.

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.

Jean Watson’s “Human Caring Theory” asserts that caring and love transcend distance, space, time, and physicality. This model of caring includes science, humanities, spirituality, and evolving facets of mind-body-spirit medicine. Establishing a firm intent to care in digital settings and then enacting caring in ways that have been validated through research and other forms of knowledge development can help sustain caring as a core value in nursing and beyond. The chapters in Part I offer an overview of Caring Science foundations, Caritas Processes, and examples of real-life applications and implementation strategies. The chapters in Part II provide activities that teachers, learners, and professionals can do to support caring in digital learning environments and during every-day digital communications. Part III explores existing online free and open global educational opportunities related to conveying and sustaining caring in the digital world, and provides simple practices that can support personal and ongoing intent to care. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and caring online trainings are ongoing teaching-learning-sharing communities and provide forums for far-reaching awareness, dialogue, and cross-cultural/interprofessional collaboration. Part IV consists of teaching materials for a self-contained course on caring that readers may use to create their own course on caring in professional or academic settings. These course materials also provide a concrete example of how to create clear and well-organized content for online courses. A significant amount of knowledge development can occur through group discussion, sharing, and collaboration.

This book is written to provide a general overview of health literacy, as it is difficult to incorporate a comprehensive illustration of every type of health literacy encounter. It is divided into four parts with specific chapters within each part for quick and easy reference. The first part of the book provides an overall baseline knowledge of health literacy. It touches on health literacy and its impact on accessing care and navigating throughout a complex health care delivery system and reviews the major health literacy efforts of the federal government, scientists, health researchers, health policy experts, and health professionals. The second part focuses on the role of oral communication. It incorporates the role and importance of culture, language, and communication access services needed to provide quality, safe person-centered care and focuses on nursing strategies to enhance effective communication and understanding. The third part focuses on written health communication. It discusses content design and layout of written health information and patient education. How written information is presented can have a tremendous impact on readability and understandability. The final part of the book helps to prepare nurses who care for unique populations. It presents health literacy implications when caring for persons in in palliative care and making difficult end-of-life decisions and identifies the uniqueness of caring for young children, patients with mental health disorders and older adults. Finally, the book presents the ethical principles of human research subjects and how to ensure that research participants with low health literacy are protected.