Kathleen Sitzman, RN, PhD, CNE is offering a free MOOC course to enhance caring practices in any work environment! The title of the course is Caring Science, Mindful Practice. It is based on Watson’s Caring Science, and will use the new textbook co-authored by Dr. Sitzman and Dr. Watson titled Caring Science, Mindful Practice: Implementing Watson’s Human Caring Theory. You can download a flyer about the course here. And, visit the web site to learn more details!
Co-authored by Candace W. Burton, PhD, RN, AFN-BC, AGN-BC, FNAP assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Monica McLemore, PhD, MPH, RN, assistant professor at the University of California San Francisco.
This week the United State Supreme Court hears arguments in Obergfell v. Hodges, a case that could determine the fate of hundreds of same sex marriages across the country. Even as our attention is drawn to that high-stakes process, it’s critical to consider how we can create an inclusive space in our own lives, work, and communities. One means of doing so is to recognize and attend to the needs of trans* and non-binary gender individuals in health care practice. As three nurses who work in mental health, reproductive health, and emergency care, we encounter people all along the gender spectrum and strive to provide safe, effective, and nonjudgmental care. We also understand that institutional-level change occurs about…
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Renewal
by Wendy Marks, DNS, ANP-BC
Spring is a time of renewal in nature. Flowers and leaves bud and bloom, birds busy to make their nests, eggs are laid, warmed and hatched, bees make hives, migratory birds fly back to northern homes.
Humans shed winter coats and boots and migrate outdoors to take in the warm breezes, air and sun.
The Unitary-Transformative paradigm informs nursing practice that humans and nature are symbiotic. External environments affect body-mind-spirit. Fresh air, the aesthetics of flowers, birds, and nature sounds affect our feeling tones by soothing our senses. Internal environments are harmonized with rest, nutrition, hydration, and happy thoughts.
Kolcaba’s Comfort Theory (2003) can be used as a guide to understand how patients, families and nurses engage in behaviors to promote physical, psychospiritual, and environmental wellbeing by providing relief, ease, and transcendence towards improved health or peaceful death.
Several Comfort Scales are available to help evaluate comfort in different settings.
Here’s a comfort scale designed for nurses:
http://www.thecomfortline.com/resources/cqs/NursesComfort%20Questionnaire.pdf
You might take the test and then ask yourself where you need to seek renewal for yourself as a human in need of caring and comfort.
What are you doing to renew yourself? Are you going to take a walk outside? Smell and feel the warm, fragrant breezes? Hear the chirp of birds and see the new flowers, leaves and bees? Will you surround yourself with others who value peace, kindness, and love?
Make your values as a nurse healer visible and explicitly engage in health seeking behaviors, free yourself from the burdens of heavy coats and boots. Set sail in the Spring time breezes and feel the sun on your face as you enter a new day and transcend all that no longer serves you.
Reference
Kolcaba, K. (2003). Comfort Theory and Practice. NY, NY: Springer. www.thecomfortline.com
This wonderful account of “Peace and Power” by Adeline Falk-Rafael has just been published!
Writtten by Adeline Falk-Rafael, PhD, FAAN, Professor, York University
For the past 4 years, I have taught a 4th year leadership course to Internationally Educated Nurses (IENs), who are in our RN-BScN program at York University in Toronto, Canada. The course is designed to support students to meet professional standards of leadership in whatever position they practice and to provide them with beginning knowledge and skills required for nursing leadership, particularly at the bedside, but applicable in positions of
Adeline Falk-Rafael
leadership as well. The course reading materials include 2 “textbooks” – one that focuses on leadership (not management) and Peace and Power. My use of Peace and Power began simply as a process to use in the classroom, as I had in other courses for years. In reading it simultaneously with leadership literature, however, I began to see the strong relationship of its tenets with relational leadership…
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For those who have followed this project for a while, you already are aware of the influence of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose book “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” has influenced not only this project, but the work of many of us involved with this project. Recently I became aware of a number of YouTube videos about Freire and his work, some 
in Portuguese, but many in English! Viewing them reminded me of the importance of returning again and again for inspiration that arises from these ideas — inspiration that keeps our gaze on what is possible and that overcomes the distress that comes from some of the discouraging events that surround us every day! I will post one of the short videos below, but also want to be sure that everyone knows about the online “Paulo Freire Formation” course offered by the Freire Institute. Here is a brief description of what this course is all about:
This is an in-depth online programme for activists, organizers and volunteers committed to social transformation. It provides training for those wanting to become more effective change agents. The six courses are taken online but with live input; those progressing to the next part of the programme will have the option to attend a 5-day ‘Intercultural Formation Meeting’. Courses can be taken flexibly according to your needs.
Freire wrote his “Pedagogy” book in the late ’60s, and it was published in English in 1971. The importance of his ideas has only increased over time, and many important scholars and activists have continued to build on his work, including a number of feminist scholars including bell hooks. Her book “Teaching to Transgress” contains a full chapter in which she examines Freire’s work and its lasting and significant contribution to feminist thought.
For me, Freire’s ideas have a close connection and deep meaning in terms of our ongoing exploration of what it means to care and to be cared for. Freire, in his later years, talked more and more about the concept of love – particularly what he called “radical love” – which is quite similar to Margaret Newman’s ideas of love as the highest form of expanded consciousness. Freire never wavered in his belief that real social change could become a reality, with the essential element of radical love – the coming together of all forms of love – as the underpinning for social change.
So watch this brief video to become more familiar with these ideas, and if you want more, just search for Paulo Freire on YouTube and/or Google, for more than a bit of inspiration!
NurseManifest 