Nursing Science Quarterly

This column explores the question: How do you want to be known? Three awakening stories are presented to provide a framework for discussing the humanbecoming processes of creative imagining, affirming personal becoming, and glimpsing the paradoxical. These processes are important in changing living quality and developing personal pattern preferences by which to be known.

To illuminate the idea of freedom in research, the author considers the nature of being a professional, which includes the dimensions as elaborated by Flexner (1915) and Taylor (1968). The dimension of autonomy, one characteristic of being a professional, is explored by utilizing the work of Hall (1968). Then the idea of situated freedom will be presented as a means to explain the professional autonomy of nurse researchers.

Global healthcare and healthcare policies are evolving with change at a swift pace. Inherent in the discussions of a person’s right to choose health is the notion of freedom. The author in this column compares and contrasts bioethical views of freedom and autonomy with alternative views and possibilities by examining an ethic of freedom grounded from a different paradigm, the humanbecoming nursing theoretical perspective.

Service learning has become a buzz term in higher academic settings. However, it may be difficult to identify activities that have both a service component and a learning component that logically flows from course objectives. The authors introduce four service learning options that may be utilized by colleges and universities nationwide. They offer support for Parse’s theory of humanbecoming as a natural underpinning to service learning and they discuss where specific aspects of Parse’s teaching-learning model may surface within service learning activities.

In order to present the state of the science of hostility among and across disciplines, a review of the literature was completed. The knowledge gained may influence nursing practice. Scholarly works from nursing, medical and basic sciences, psychology, sociology, education, philosophy, business, communication, and criminology were reviewed. Similar patterns in the use of the concept were discovered. The patterns revealed five themes: hostility as a health-risk factor, hostility as a factor in family relationships, hostility as a factor in perceived challenge, hostility as a factor in criminal behavior, and hostility as a factor in the workplace. Based on the knowledge gained about hostility, implications for nursing practice related to changing the hostile working environment for nurses were suggested using modeling and role-modeling nursing theory.

Concerns about intellectual property for nursing are becoming increasingly acute as information becomes highly accessible in the digital age. Nurse faculty members need to check policies of the agencies that they work for to evaluate explicit written policies for their protection and full understanding of the agency’s rights.

Due to the stressors involved in the field of nursing, resilience has been identified as an essential trait for those working in the profession. Nurses must deal with many issues that can lead to exhaustion and burnout. The Neuman Systems Model focuses on types of stressors that may cause harm to a person’s health and well-being. The purposes of this article are to offer the Neuman Systems Model as a conceptual framework for exploring nurse resilience, and to describe strategies that promote resilience-building in nurses.

The purpose of this article is to describe the creative process and nursing implications of the website, Holding Heartspace: A Nonphysical Ashram for the Like-hearted to Honor Story, Process, and Sacred Intentions of Caring-Healing-Loving in the World. Holding Heartspace is an example of a virtual community that links the experiences of nurses from around the world to a centralized forum. This site is the culminating project of the author’s participation in and graduation from the Caritas Coach Education Program (CCEP). Human caring science is a theory of nursing maintaining several relevant components and definitions that have fostered the creation of Holding Heartspace. It is within the contextual realm of caring science that facilitation from caritas (compassionate, generous love) to the more universal communitas (recognition of our collective humanity) is realized and experienced (Watson, 2008).

The author in this article presents a theory of decision-making in nursing, specifically a middle-range theory of intuitive decision-making in nursing created through the synthesis of Patricia Benner’s model of skill acquisition in nursing and Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. The author proposes that Damasio’s somatic state is equivalent to what Benner has identified as intuition. When a nurse is faced with a decision, intuition, if developed, is a somatic state that creates a measurable physiological biasing signal (skin conductive response) that helps in making an advantageous decision. Research, educational, clinical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Woody Allen once quoted, “I don’t mind dying so much, I just don’t want to be there when it happens” (as cited in Ingram, 2002, p. 1). Oftentimes, death is not a happy subject, a reality that most of us fear, yet something we all must face. In this paper, three articles were reviewed that explored the living-dying (Phillips, 1992) process of the terminally ill and the material was conceptualized in light of Rogers (1994) science of unitary human beings. To further understand and explore the living–dying process, creative examples (movie screenplay, novel, song and others) were cited. During the living-dying process exploration, three common themes were expressed by the subjects (dying persons), namely: valuing own perspective of quality of life; choosing personal meanings with ways of moving beyond with the possibles (Lee & Pilkington, 1999), while focusing on life’s meaning rather than life’s details (Dobratz, 2002); and connecting to the world-as-unknown while self-separating to the world-as-known in actively seeking the union with death (Kubler-Ross, 1981; Callanan & Kelly, 1992; Dobratz, 2002). It is important for healthcare providers to recognize and acknowledge all three themes to be able to understand dying persons, to focus on their wholeness rather than their disease, and to help families discern symbolic messages conveyed by them. Moreover, knowing these themes also enables healthcare providers to help all parties to transition and be able to accept and embrace the most difficult process—the living-dying (Phillips, 1992) process.

This column is about the financial and human benefits of effective interdisciplinary healthcare teams approach and the use of the humanbecoming school of thought in head and neck oncology in the United Kingdom. Included is a brief comparison with oncology treatment in the United States.

This article is chiefly concerned with the question is nursing, particularly oncology nursing, both improved and more affordable when persons are honored in the manner suggested by Rosemarie Rizzo Parse’s humanbecoming school of thought and when nurses are respected members of multidisciplinary teams? The authors offer a theoretical article on the evolution of cancer multidisciplinary teams and examine current thinking on teamwork in the hospital setting.

The focus of this article is epistemic injustice as an underlying explanation for the lack of communication associated with moral distress in frontline nurses who provide end-of-life care. Improvements in interprofessional collaboration and communication in this challenging area of practice are needed, as supported by research on moral distress and related studies. Policy development that addresses interprofessional practice inclusive of all healthcare providers, particularly frontline nurses, in deliberations about end-of-life treatment deliberations and decisions is proposed.

The purpose of this essay is to share my ideas about the connection between theories and statistics. The essay content reflects my concerns about some researchers’ and readers’ apparent lack of clarity about what constitutes appropriate statistical testing and conclusions about the empirical adequacy of theories. The reciprocal relation between theories and statistics is emphasized and the conclusion is that statistics without direction from theory is no more than a hobby.