The fourth edition of Holistic Nursing: A Handbook for Practice attests to the success and use of previous versions, moving from theory, knowledge, and values to skills and applications that integrate per sonal and professional competencies of Being into Caring Healing Practices.
This edition builds upon and extends the preceding editions by continuing to update the knowledge base with the most current, cutting-edge science.
The authors use a strong scientific-theoretical-philosophical foundation to underpin both current and futuristic practices, that inform and guide nursing and system directions for implementing, integrating, extending, and sustaining both basic and advanced holistic nursing modalities across setting, time, and space.
The content for this edition continues to explicate as well as incorporate comprehensive-integrative approaches to body mind-spirit nursing and Era III nursing/ medicine.
These perspectives intersect and embrace biomedical developments in the field of “complementary-integrative bio medical” advances.
This work is congruent with an ethical and moral foundation for transpersonal dimensions of caring and healing practices at all levels, in that it honors the wholeness of our Being and Becoming more human, humane, and spiritual in our evolution as both a profession and as an evolving humanity.
This work continues to guide this field of holistic nursing by offering an advanced orientation along with advanced knowledge and practices.
It brings forth the beauty, art, and artistry of the human dimensions of holistic nursing, continually informed and deepened by the American Holistic Nurses’ Association, as well as the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association.
This intellectual and standardized foundational text expands the context and significance of the ethical, epistemological, and praxis dimensions.
It calls forth not only the intellectual importance, but the values-guided aspects of higher deeper levels of commitment, compassion, love, and caring that underpin this kind of advanced practice: a holistic practice that is oriented toward the betterment of human health, healing, and humankind.
The evolution of the fourth edition reflects the continuing evolution of the nursing profession. It is a seminal work that contributes to the emergence of mature holistic standards and practices within a contemporary postmodern Era III scientific phase; yet this new edition continues to ground these practices in a blueprint of timeless goals, along with the finest heritage and wisdom of Nightingale.
These new/old developments of holistic nursing guide students, faculty, and practicing nurses with breakthroughs related to expanding consciousness research, notions of internationality, energetic healing, and new views of the body, as well as spirituality through compassionate human service.
These notions transcend, yet embrace, basic research in body mind medicine, psychophysiology, human potential, and so on, integrating values with comprehensive knowledge, clinical skills, and professional standards that inform advanced practice. As holistic nursing experts, the authors are committed to the deepest actualization of nursing, as an ancient and pioneering, yet futuristic, profession.
They practice what they teach by translating and integrating this latest thinking into pragmatic and concrete nursing actions, processes, and artistic acts of caring and healing. They help us all to comprehend the critical nature of these practices in relation to nursing and how these practices inform any “caring moment.”
A consequence of this important, expanded work is that the self of the nurse is invited and even reminded of their calling into nursing, into self-care and self-healing, as essentials for authentic living of this knowledge in their personal/professional life.
As such, then, by transforming self, the holistic nurse is helping to transform systems. In summary, this fourth edition provides a framework for all of nursing’s caring healing practices; it offers a guide for per sonal self-care within the holistic paradigm.
The result: a major work of excellence that grounds nursing in the current demands from within and without for reform, while generating new traditions and standards of personal and professional excellence and authenticity.
At another level, this work transcends nursing and has relevance for transdisciplinary education and practices, leading to greater authenticity and advancement of patient care between and among all health professionals.
