Upcoming Book From ANA Focuses on Relevance of Nightingale's Life and Work to 21st Centruy Nursing and Health Care

Alabama Nurse, Jun-Aug 2003

Washington, DC - Much of modern nursing's heritage comes through its founder, Florence Nightingale, born on this day in 1820. A fiery and visionary interdisciplinary healer and practitioner, her contributions to nursing and public health practice, research and statistics, social and political reform, and nursing theory are fundamental to health care. An upcoming book from nursesbooks.org, the publishing program of the American Nurses Association (ANA), will examine and analyze this legacy and demonstrate how it offers a vision and a blueprint for renewing nursing and health care-a profession and industry in mutual crisfs-in the coming decades.

Florence Nightingale's Blueprint for the 21st Century: Healing, Leadership, Global Vision is grounded in the necessarily integrated personal, political, scientific, social, and spiritual domains of Nightingale's life and work. As nurses and Nightingale scholars, authors Barbara Montgomery Dossey, PhD, RN, HNC, FAAN; Louise C. Selanders, EdD, RN; and Deva-Marie Beck, PhD, RN, have employed historical research and recent scholarship to assess and analyze in-depth the Nightingale legacy and show, its relevance to contemporary nursing and health care.

The result is a unified context from which to consider and help resolve the chaos of local, national, and international health issues that includes the nursing shortage. Even as many health care organizations seek to bring healing and caring into their environments, nurses struggle to convey that their profession-for which such healing and caring is as fundamental as its science and technology-is the pivotal one for health care.

In the process, Florence Nightingale's Blueprint for the 21st Century will also help to counter the often fragmentary (and thus superficial or trivializing) accounts of Nightingale that continue to appear. Her life stories are contained within the primary documents that are discussed in this book, along with other supporting primary and secondary sources. These stories also convey the wholeness and unity of her life and of her work. Activist, environmentalist, feminist, healer, mystic, politician, practitioner, reformer, scientist...all were roles of this practical health-care pioneer.

Some of those primary documents comprise a unique feature of the book, which contains both the collection of Nightingale's 13 formal letters to her nurses (written between 1872 and 1900) and her famous 1893 essay "Sick-Nursing and Health-Nursing." Each is presented in complete and unedited form along with an extensive analysis. Also noteworthy are its appendices that help make the book a quick reference resource.

Forward-looking as was its subject, Florence Nightingale's Blueprint for the 21st Century: Healing, Leadership, Global Vision is scheduled for publication in August 2003, which will mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of Nightingale's nursing career. It will be co-published with the Florence Nightingale Museum Trust (London, England).

Nursesbooks.org, the publishing program of ANA, publishes a variety of books and monographs. These works translate the latest in evidence-based nursing and related health care findings into practice-centered resources for nurse leaders, managers, practitioners, educators, and students. To learn more, go to www.nursesbooks.org, a part of the ANA Web site: www.NursingWorld.org.

The American Nurses Association is the only fullservice professional organization representing the nation's 2.7 million Registered Nurses through its constituent member nurses associations. The ANA advances, the nursing profession by fostering high standards of nursing practice, promoting the rights of nurses in the workplace, projecting a positive and realistic view of nursing, and by lobbying the Congress and regulatory agencies on health care issues affecting nurses and the public.