Nurse: Past, Present and 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.

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