The author began her community nursing career as a Health Visitor in a low-income multicultural area of London. In 1976, she took off to Thailand with an English nongovernmental organization (NGO) as part of a four-person medical team to establish health services in a Laotian refugee camp. While she struggled with microbiology and immunology, her training as a health visitor put her far ahead of her medical colleagues in such areas as community health, teaching, and psychology. When the Ministry of Health (MOH) requested a WHO nursing consultant to develop a Primary Health Care (PHC) focused Public Health Nurse training, she immediately got involved. She was determined that urban nurses would never again look down on rural patients and would tailor their preparation for discharge to the conditions to which their patients returned. The community health module was strengthened to better address the issue of rising non-communicable disease rates.

This chapter defines new meaning to nursing’s paradigm that were derived from clinically inducted, empirical experiences, combined with the authors’ philosophical, intellectual, and experiential background. The early work emerged from the authors’ own values, beliefs, and perceptions about personhood, life, health, and healing, and how they manifest clinically and empirically. The authors’ work was guided by the commitment to nursing’s collective caring-healing role and mission in society as attending to and helping to sustain humanity and wholeness as foundation to health and nursing’s purpose for existence. The original work was further shaped by phenomenological psychology and philosophy. The cara-tive factors and general caring language help to release nursing from its political and practice history of medical language dominance and orientation. The carative factors thus serve to help define nursing knowledge, practices, and phenomena as distinct from, but complementary with, curing knowledge and practices associated with modern medicine.

This chapter presents the philosophical and theoretical perspectives of caring, knowing, and story underpinning the study of nursing situations. It describes underpinnings of the caring nature of the discipline and practice of nursing, patterns of knowing in nursing, theories of narrative knowing. The chapter also describes the use of situated stories of professional practice supporting the process of teaching/learning from nursing situations as essential to the study and practice of nursing. Nursing begins with a call for help with a health-related concern. Knowing in nursing is essential to the study and practice of nursing and is foundational to the use of case studies, stories, or nursing situations in nursing education. Prior to the development of nursing theories, the knowledge of nursing was primarily drawn from other related disciplines such as medicine, biology, and psychology combined with traditions of caring.

This chapter proposes that Watson’s philosophy/science/theory of human caring, although also developed with individuals in mind, has the potential to be such a framework because of its philosophic congruence with community health nursing. Watson continues her visionary quest to move nursing’s caring-healing practices from the margins to the center of societal health and healing practices. This work strongly reflects the influences of consciousness theory, noetic sciences, quantum physics, transpersonal psychology, Jungian psychology, and feminist theories, among others, that have gained prominence in her work over the past decade. Watson’s humanistic, existential, and metaphysical conceptualization of human beings underpins her view of both the transpersonal caring relationship that is central to her theory and her conceptualization of health-illness. Important to note is that the 10 Carative Factors are based on a knowledge base, clinical competence, and healing intention.

This chapter focuses on the family and its role in maintaining health and well-being. Family-centered nursing is the appropriate nursing system in these instances. 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; it may be the setting within which dependent care is provided; or it may be the unit of service for which nursing is provided. Much of the knowledge the nurse has regarding family is from the foundational sciences or antecedent bodies of knowledge such as sociology or psychology. The chapter looks at the family as it relates to the proper object of nursing. It helps the learner to describe important elements of Family Systems Theory, identify types of family function, describe nursing in family situations in terms of self-care, and differentiate between family-centered nursing and Family Systems Nursing.

This chapter reveals the experiences of 35 nurses who were deployed for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The nurses describe how “doing nursing” in a war zone changed them personally and expanded their nursing skills, and how reintegration was more difficult than they had anticipated. Some nurses reported a fairly smooth transition with strong support from their families and communities. They wanted people to be patient with them, listen to their stories, and be nonjudgmental. They wanted to be thanked for their service and feel appreciated. On the other hand, nurses who felt a lack of support and connection were devastated. Some nurses struggled in their relationships with family and friends who did not seem to understand that they needed to heal themselves emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually after being deployed. Some nurses reported turmoil in their extended families with the sharing of responsibilities for elderly parents.