Full Description
This book aims to introduce nurses and other healthcare professionals to how anthropology can help them understand nursing as a profession and as a culture.
Drawing on key anthropological concepts, the book facilitates the understanding and critical consideration of nursing practice, as seen across a wide range of health care contexts, and which impacts the delivery of appropriate care for service users. Considering the fields in which nurses work, the book argues that in order for nurses to optimize their roles as deliverers of patient care, they must not only engage with the realities of the cultural world of the patient, but also that of their own multi-professional cultural environment.
The only book currently in the field on anthropology of nursing, this book will be a valuable resource for nursing students at all academic levels, especially where they can pursue specific modules in the subject, as well as those other students pursuing medical anthropology courses. As well as this, it will be an essential text for those post-graduate students who wish to consider alternative world views from anthropology and their application in nursing and healthcare, in addition to their undertaking ethnographic research to explore nursing in all its fields of practice.
Contents
1. Principles of anthropology for nursing and health care 2. Culture and nursing: an anthropological perspective 3. Researching culture: principles of ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork 4. Time and space in the context of nursing work 5. Rituals, rites and nursing practice 6. Transition and initiation: the student nurse 7. Nursing work within nursing culture: images and reality 8. Dirt, pollution and the body: meaning for nursing practice 9. Withdrawal of treatment in the critical care unit: Insights into a trajectory of dying and death 10. Nursing and culture: language, knowledge and power
