Due to technical difficulties with my webinar last week I decided to make a recording of my presentation that is now available as a YouTube video. The length is just under 30 minutes. I hope you will join me for “lunch” or “tea” to experience the video, and share your thoughts and critique here or on the Advances in Nursing Science Journal blog. This presentation covers some of the ideas from my recent paper “The Integrality of Situated Caring in Nursing and the Environment” published in the current issue of Advances in Nursing Science. I sincerely look forward to the dialogue that I hope this presentation and paper will provoke. Don’t be shy, please share your thoughts. |
Month: February 2012
Dream of a Healing House & Feminist thought in nursing
Toady I posted on my own blog a “reprint” of the “Dream of a Healing House” that appeared in 1989 in the now-defunct journal Nursing and Health Care. For those who 
have become familiar with the NurseManifest project, you will immediately recognize that the dream, and the feminist ideas that I wrote about then are also part of the foundation of the NurseManifest project. It seems like a discouragingly long time since I first wrote this article, and of course it is even much longer since others have conceived of similar ideas. But, those of us who have been and are inspired by the ideals embedded in NurseManifest possibilities thankfully never give up the dream!
What prompted me to get permission to “reprint” the dream was a request, by email, from a school in Australia that was facing a routine accreditation review of their curriculum, and in the documents that they had on record describing the curriculum there was a reference to a “dream of a healing house” that was not cited, but that folks involved with the program believed to have been published by me at some point along the way! They were contacting me to see if this was the case, and if so, where was it published. I still do not know what their curriculum materials contain, but of course I provided the information they needed and urged them to keep working to make this a reality!
This kind of connection continues to pop up regularly with the NurseManifest project – someone somehow hears about or sees the web site, and either emails or comments when we meet about how much the web site means to them. So far we have done no promotion, and I wonder what might happen if we were to find more ways to let folks know we exist? But regardless, I am so very glad that the ideas are “out there” as part of a much wider and deeper trust that we can make a difference!
If you have had experiences that affirm the possibility that our ideals can, or actually are coming into action, please share here! Just share a comment about what you have experienced, and let’s build a “log” of things that affirm our conviction that the ideals can be real!
Nursing and the Environment
Valentine’s Day edit: Here is a narrated version of the presentation I gave last week. Redefining the Metalanguage of Nursing
I just watched the film “The Politics of Caring” featured on the nursemanifest.com website and oh, does it make some powerful statements about politics in nursing that are still relevant today! A core messages in the film is the importance of improving hospital working conditions, both for the nurses, and for the safety and health of patients. Growing out of my involvement in the NurseManifest Project, much of my current work directly focuses on research about the nursing work environment, including nurse staffing and management practices.
One of the defining moments of my nursing education was learning about the concept of “Upstream Thinking” in my senior year Community & Public Health Nursing course. We learned about John Snow’s classic work on the London Cholera Epidemic of 1854 and read Patricia Butterfield’s seminal “Thinking Upstream” article (Adv Nurs Sci 1990;12(2):1-8) that challenged nurses to think beyond one-to-one caring relationships and embrace the social, environmental and political determinants of health. This was reinforced the following year in my graduate nursing theory course, with the addition of Butterfield’s then new paper, “Upstream Reflections on Environmental Health” (Adv Nurs Sci 2002;25(1):32-49). While nursing education programs are working to integrate new content in (epi)genetics, (epi)genomics and environmental health it is more important than ever to emphasize the interconnectedness (or integrality) of human beings and the environment.
The macro-level and micro-level (holographic) ways that human beings, including nurses, are interconnected with their environment and each other will be the main focus of a free webinar/seminar that I’m giving next week and hope you will be able to attend. The presentation is titled Redefining the Metalanguage of Nursing Science: Contemporary Underpinnings for Innovation in Research, Education and Practice and will be on Wednesday, Feb 8, 2012 (12-1:30 EST) at the University of Pennsylvania, Barbara Bates Center for the Study of Nursing History. This presentation will utilize images and narrative to explore the ideas presented in my new paper, The Integrality of Situated Caring in Nursing and the Environment, currently featured on the Advances in Nursing Science website. To register for the webinar: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/210662026
NurseManifest 