Nurse: Past/Present/Future: The Making of Modern Nursing - Softcover

9781906155995: Nurse: Past/Present/Future: The Making of Modern Nursing

Nurse: Past/Present/Future examines the culture of nursing on all levels, from its historical development to its status today. The book highlights the power and the value of nurses worldwide and traces the evolution of nursing as a career.

There are currently 35 million nurses worldwide, they make up the majority of hospital staff and provide more primary care to patients than any other class of healthcare provider. There is a shortage of nurses in the UK, USA, Canada and a number of other developed countries. Currently only 20% of the nurses in Europe are male, encouraging the stereotypical view of nursing being a female profession.

Nurse: Past/Present/Future opens with a look at the importance of nursing to health systems and economics across the world, including the impact of nurse migration patterns on employment demographics. This opening chapter includes a forward-looking essay exploring the prospects and pitfalls of workforce mobility. The second chapter traces the evolution of the nurse’s social standing, appearance, education and skill set, and examines some of the key debates now underway. These are put into context with a look at how nursing has progressed through the twentieth century in response to changes in medicine and society.

The focus then shifts to the workplace: looking at the vast number of settings that nurses practice in, from patient homes to war-zone triage and from high-tech hospitals to call centres, and how the current developments taking place in these settings are redefining how nurses work now. The relationship between nurses, doctors and others involved in healthcare is discussed, exploring the working dynamics in previous and current generations of nurses with a contribution looking at nurse-doctor relations in twenty-first century patient care.

Lastly, the final chapter traces the trajectories of a selection of nurses in order to convey the aspirations, opportunities, frustrations and accomplishments that define their careers.

Beautifully illustrated, comprehensive and global in scope, Nurse is the first book of its kind, dedicated to the past, present and future of the culture of nursing.

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From the Back Cover

Nurse: past, present and future looks back at how the nursing profession has evolved over the 100 years since the death of Florence Nightingale. What are the key developments that have brought us to where we are today, and how have these changed the experience of nurses on the ground?

We hear from Helen Sweet on the evolution of professional nursing, Mireille Kingma on recent trends in nurse migration, Andrea Baumann on the global impact
of changes in nursing education, Christine Hancock on the common challenges nurses face around the globe, Yumi Tamura on Interprofessional Collaboration and Maureen Shawn Kennedy on nurses as agents of change in society.
These distinguished nursing leaders guide us through the issues nursing as a profession is confronting today.

Interwoven with their essays are the stories of individual nurses, working in many different countries and contexts. Some are now retired, others are at the vanguard of nursing, redefining the profession for the twenty-first century. We meet Queen’s Nurse Geoff Hunt, among the first male District Nurses in England; Kelly Knoll, a newly-graduated nurse practitioner in Canada who survived the 1990s, when jobs were hard to come by and university requirements for licensing were making senior nurses nervous; Mavis Stewart, who travelled from Jamaica to train and work as a nurse and decipher the British class system; Lois Scott, an international pioneer in tele-nursing; Ghislaine T�l�maque, who divides her time between nursing in the communitites in Qu�bec’s far north, and relief missions in troubled countries; Veronica D’souza, Matron of the main operating theatre at the Bombay Hospital; Carol Etherington, who has worked in natural and man-made disasters in the US and abroad, amongst many others.

The experiences they describe enable us to understand how progress in nursing plays out on the ground and what it is that keeps nurses committed to their profession.

About the Author

Kate Trant; is a research advisor for the Commission of Architecture and the Built Environment. London, UK

Sue Usher; Director, Health Policy Division, Parkhurst Publishing Ltd. Montreal, QC

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