The advancement of knowledge in the natural sciences has an ideal form. Every secondary school curriculum includes lessons about the scientific method. The authors Wang and Geale remind us that that nursing specifically, and healthcare generally, is what happens when the advancement of this knowledge meets real people. Healthcare is full of dynamic processes characterized […]
How do we understand our own illness, and how does it affect us? When a patient is ill, how can healthcare professionals—especially nurses—help shape a positive understanding of what is happening? In the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, J. A. Aloi discusses techniques to help patients edit their own story. Although focused on mental health, […]
There is no single profession which can meet all patients’ needs, Vasiliki Matziou et al. begin. The authors later explain it’s quite the opposite: when healthcare professionals collaborate, there are better health outcomes, higher patient satisfaction, and lower costs.1, 2 This much is known, but what influences how well nurses and physicians communicate? What exactly […]
The bulk of my work is wrapped up in teaching how stories can be useful in clinical situations. I believe that stories and storytelling make life better and more meaningful. I tend, though, to downplay narrative work that can’t explicitly help doctors, nurses, and administrators serve patients more effectively. I suppose that comes from a […]
Last week, examining Greg Mahr’s ideas about assessing a patient’s decision-making capacities, I found it odd that there is nearly no difference between the outcome of a traditional decision-making assessment and a proposed, new narrative assessment. Mahr does a wonderful job of explaining why narrative is important and how a narrative assessment is focused on […]
Teaching health care providers how to collaborate between disciplines is considered an important mechanism for enhancing communication and interprofessional practice (IPP) among professionals, optimizing staff participation in clinical decision making, and improving the delivery of patient care1, 2, write Lindsay Baker, Eileen Egan-Lee, Maria Athina “Tina” Martimianakis and Scott Reeves. Their article in the Journal […]
Writing in the journal Humanities, Wendy Bowles addresses the question, How do nurse educators who enable Narrative Pedagogy experience Listening: knowing and connecting? This article discusses the education of nurses in light of the “Concernful Practices” framework for Narrative Pedagogy, and centers on its “Listening: knowing and connecting” element. Bowles specifically presents how “Listening as […]
Mona Ewertsson, Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, and Karin Blomberg noticed that there is precious little data available on how nurses move from the academic knowledge of their profession into its clinical practice. Much of the literature on socialisation in nursing has focused on describing negative experiences that shape the socialisation process, they write in Nurse Education in […]
It’s been several years since my own near-fatal health scare. In the time between now and then, I’ve often reflected on how, no matter how I felt about the physicians in charge, I always implicitly trusted the nurses. I had doctors who must have hidden their halo somewhere, and I had doctors whose degree I […]
