Distinguished by abundant patient and health provider narratives highlighting the impact of health disparities on health outcomes worldwide, A Population Health Approach to Health Disparities for Nurses is a scholarly yet practical text that prepares RN-BSN, DNP, and PhD students to work toward improving community health for a variety of underserved and vulnerable populations. Grounded in the population health approach addressed in the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Essentials, it delivers practical steps nurses can take to address population health goals, including the improvement of quality of care, access to healthcare, outcomes, and cost management. Written by lawyers, physicians, social workers, statisticians and economists, psychologists, ethicists, finance experts, population health specialists, anthropologists, and nurses, the text emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to learning and all components of healthcare—delivery of care, policy, research, and teaching. It examines demographic differences, chronic and acute health conditions, and the health needs of the unserved/underserved across the life cycle. It highlights the importance of understanding the social determinants of health and discusses ways to address health disparities through changes in public policy, attitudes, beliefs, education, research, and advocacy.

This book highlights the alarming statistics regarding medical errors and the most common causes. A thorough review of the literature identified the most significant errors and their causes. The significance of critical thinking, logic, and clinical judgment has been well established, and the book includes strategies for developing and improving these skills. It addresses case studies, exemplars, tips from the field, discussion questions, and special topics that support the integration and application of the important concepts. The book is structured and organized around two major units. Unit I addresses the severity of the issue and common causes. It provides an overview of the issue and the agencies that focus on patient safety. Despite numerous policy changes and strategies, patient errors have continued to increase after a previous improvement that stemmed from the initiatives after the landmark report To Err Is Human. Common medical errors include medication errors, patient falls, pressure ulcers, infections, and surgical errors. Unit I also describes the primary causes with poor communication being one of the most common causes. Unit II focuses on improving patient safety and decreasing adverse events. It focuses on ways to become a safe practitioner through education and competency development. It also highlights several theories that can be used to promote quality of care and decrease adverse outcomes. It then focuses on the significance of critical thinking in promoting patient outcomes and ways to develop and improve critical thinking and reasoning. The book focuses on prioritization and delegation and ways to develop these skills in addition to the scope of practice, intuition, and ethics. It focuses on leadership and emotional intelligence and finally focuses on the issue from a holistic approach and includes cultural humility and artificial intelligence.

This nursing handbook introduces and defines key terms about race and racism for nurses, nursing students, and nurse educators. It addresses how race and racism act as structural and core social determinants of health and propel health inequities. It moves beyond a focus on multicultural approaches for understanding inequity toward a recognition of the broader impact that both systemic and structural racism have had on inequality in health and life opportunities. Through a social justice lens, the book underscores how nurses, as frontline health professionals, need to understand racism as a factor behind these inequities and its significance to their working environment and nursing practice.

In concise chapters with brief paragraphs and bulleted information, this practical handbook offers strategies for how to productively engage in a dialogue about race and racism. It considers the history of racism in the United States and then breaks down how it operates at structural, institutional, and individual levels. Case studies illustrate such concepts as microaggressions, implicit bias, power, privilege, and intersectionality in order to foster understanding and provide opportunities for both self-reflection and collective conversation.

This book is designed to raise the awareness of fellow nursing colleagues about the opportunities that exist for them in aiding governments and health infrastructures to obtain the targets established by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Additionally, it provides ample opportunities for the profession to integrate global considerations into nursing curricula, research efforts, and practice initiatives right now. The book first provides a background of emerging considerations in global nursing and global health for personal-planetary transformation, a brief history and future directions of the relationship between nursing and the UN, guidelines for global leadership and discussion of the importance of global citizenship, and ethics in the global health context. Then, it provides a primer on the 17 SDGs. Readers will find information about the SDG targets, options for how nursing can play direct and indirect roles in furthering the priorities of each goal, and the current initiatives under way that deserve global nursing’s input and partnership if they are to be truly effective. Finally, the book articulates a vision for the future of global nursing and global health, one that: moves from the firsthand global wisdom of nurses who guide us to further the SDGs in countries around the world; requires us to be reflective as individuals, with partners, groups, organizations, and communities as we commit to sustainable development; creates a collaboration consciousness to engender unity and peace; and illustrates a Post-2030 Agenda, beyond the SDGs, for planetary health.

This book introduces the rich history accompanying the formation of birth centers in the United States and internationally. As you read the stories told by the midwives who founded this movement, sit back, take some time, and imagine the passion and vision of the early proponents of the freestanding birth center model. Most of these women are still alive, a few in their 80s and 90s, but they continue to actively promote and expose newcomers to the model they created with the support of many others. Many important health care issues are addressed in the book. Health system structure and function, innovation, the triple aim, policy, quality, and education all impact the expansion of the community-based birth center model. Birth centers are making a difference locally in the communities in which they are built, as well as nationally as the spotlight shines on models of care demonstrating improved outcomes. In passages that are woven throughout the book, the reader is introduced to “exemplar birth centers”. These centers stand out as shining examples of integration into health systems, different providers working together, enhanced services, the franchise model, and innovative educational opportunities. Finally, the book brings the history and current status of birth center knowledge into the future by introducing readers to the possibility of starting a birth center of their own.

This narrative-based book is the first to describe Human Caring Literacy from the perspective of caring scientists who “live the life” by incorporating the precepts of human caring into every aspect of their personal and professional lives. It describes the methods that help practitioners develop mindfulness, reflection, authentic presence, intentionality, and a caring consciousness in the service of providing authentic, heart-centered care for patients, their families, and societies. Critical Caritas Literacy ultimately is an ontology of being/becoming that comes from within the subjective inner lifeworld of each person, morally aroused for reflective and contemplative self-growth, self-caring experiences that contribute to the whole of humanity. Having a high level of Caritas Literacy allows one to quickly form deep, trusting relationships, often within the first hour of meeting. There is a professional requirement for nurses to achieve competence in the delivery of spiritual care and to assess and meet the spiritual needs of their patients. Culturally competent care can relieve medical and social ills, poor cultural competency reproduces stereotypes and may lead to further microlevel conflict. Structurally, health care settings can facilitate nurse’s dual role as conflict mitigator by caring for nurses, providing burnout prevention, providing self-care rooms and staff support, and offering frequent debriefing with the aid of holistic healers, chaplains, and social workers.

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 imparts to the health care provider the basic tools of Spanish linguistics needed to provide care for the Spanish-speaking patient. The reader is provided with a variety of options to incorporate into his or her language goals. The book includes basic to advanced grammar, basic to advanced history and physical examination scenarios, and hospital-specialty-based patient encounters. An entire chapter is dedicated to enhancing the transcultural awareness of the health care provider caring for patients in the various countries that comprise Latin America. Each chapter includes a range of 8 to 36 audio segments that have been recorded in the Spanish language and in the English language, which enable the student to hear the pronunciation of the words, phrases, and sentences designed to enhance the interactions between the nurse and the Spanish-speaking patient. The book is divided into three sections. Section I presents the basics of Spanish language with chapters covering the alphabets, essential verbs, time and numbers. Basic anatomy, basic medical phrases, expressions to know the patient’s diet, his/her family, and Spanish phrases commonly used in patient care are also provided. The second section on medical Spanish begins with a presentation on patient assessment which is followed by discussions on pregnancy, childbirth and contraception. Transcultural assessment of the Spanish-speaking patient is also described. Section III offers summary review exercises and answers to review activities.

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 provides a framework to assist nurses in achieving this ethical competence. James Rest’s four-component model (FCM) integrates the cognitive and affective processes that form an understanding of ethical nursing practice: sensitivity, judgment, motivation, and action. Beginning with a brief overview of ethical theories and principles and building on the experiences of readers who are practicing nurses, each chapter includes one or more evolving case scenarios. Questions posed with each case scenario encourage ethical sensitivity, awareness of personal values, and use of a decision-making model that integrates elements of virtue and care ethics. Recognizing the challenges that arise when attempting to implement a justifiable decision, strategies to maintain ethical motivation, or moral courage, are also presented. Skills to enhance the nurse’s actions in everyday ethical practice with patients, family members, and peers, such as protecting autonomy, promoting safety, and speaking out against lateral violence, are discussed. The two main forms of clinical ethics in a hospital are: ethics committees and ethics consultation services. As the nurse is obligated to maintain and improve the moral environment, several chapters discuss the competencies needed to recognize and address organizational and societal issues. The three ethical issues arising for clinical nurses in the provision of person-and family-centered care (PFCC) are: ensuring that the patient’s voice has primacy over that of the nurse; honoring the choices of the patient even when they conflict with those of the nurse; and engaging with family as the patient directs.