Toward a History of Health Care: Repositioning the Histories of Nursing and Medicine.

This positioning paper presents a new paradigm for the history of both nursing and medicine that will involve studying these actors and their practices in relation to each other rather than, as we have done, in isolation. This is not to say that both disciplines have had the same orientation and the same ambitions. Nursing, as I argue, has had a more constant focus and impact on its particular communities; medicine, by contrast, more successfully articulated a commitment to depersonalized knowledge and expertise that seemed to transcend individual and community experiences. Yet these may be the two sides of the same proverbial coin. Nursing and medicine needed each other to make their particular claims to authority and expertise and, in the end, to achieve the success of their "scientific agenda."

Reforming nursing registration: Lessons from pandemics.

A nimble and flexible regulatory response regarding the nursing workforce is essential to a fully integrated public health approach to national crises and pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn many comparisons to the 1918 Flu Pandemic. Some of them are well-reasoned and grounded in evidence. Other are not. This study provides a historically contextualized analysis of how the 1918 flu pandemic helped shape Pennsylvania nursing's current regulatory apparatus. We conclude that the state-based solutions that nursing registration represents are inadequate to deal with pandemics and crises with national, if not global, reach. We need to move immediately toward the national COMPACT system, while mindful of how regulatory processes and procedures can reinforce structural inequities.

The Perspectives of Volunteer Counselors of Korean Immigrant Women Experiencing Intimate Partner Violence.

This study investigates what needs to be considered in our current health services to appropriately respond to abused Korean immigrant women. Using a community-based participatory approach, this qualitative interpretive description analyzed counseling documents and semi-structured interviews. Data analyses suggested that intimate partner violence (IPV) screening for ethnic minority women in health care settings can be improved by informing patients about the role of health care providers in addressing IPV, establishing rapport before IPV screening, assuring confidentiality is maintained, respecting Korean immigrant women's unique perspectives and response toward IPV, providing translation services, and collaborating with ethnic minority women's community organizations.

Addressing sexual health behaviour during emerging adulthood: a critical review of the literature.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: In this critical literature review, we examine evidence-based interventions that target sexual behaviours of 18- to 25-year-old emerging adult women. BACKGROUND: Nurses and clinicians implement theory-driven research programmes for young women with increased risk of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections. Strategies to decrease transmission of HIV and sexually transmitted infections are rigorously evaluated and promoted by public health agencies such as the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While many interventions demonstrate episodic reductions in sexual risk behaviours and infection transmission, there is little evidence they build sustainable skills and behaviours. Programmes may not attend to contextual and affective influences on sexual behaviour change. DESIGN: Discursive paper. METHODS: We conducted a conceptually based literature review and critical analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's best-evidence and good-evidence HIV behavioural interventions. In this review, we examined three contextual and affective influences on the sexual health of emerging adult women: (1) developmental age, (2) reproduction and pregnancy desires and (3) sexual security or emotional responses accompanying relationship experiences. RESULTS: Our analyses revealed intervention programmes paid little attention to ways age, desires for pregnancy or emotional factors influence sexual decisions. Some programmes included 18- to 25-year-olds, but they made up small percentages of the sample and did not attend to unique emerging adult experiences. Second, primary focus on infection prevention overshadowed participant desires for pregnancy. Third, few interventions considered emotional mechanisms derived from relationship experiences involved in sexual decision-making. CONCLUSIONS: Growing evidence demonstrates sexual health interventions may be more effective if augmented to attend to contextual and affective influences on relationship risks and decision-making. Modifying currently accepted strategies may enhance sustainability of sexual health-promoting behaviours. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: This study provides nurses and public health educators with recommendations for broadening the content of sexual health promotion intervention programming.

The future in the past: Hildegard Peplau and interpersonal relations in nursing.

Researchers, educators and clinicians have long recognized the profound influence of the mid-twentieth century focus on interpersonal relations and relationships on nursing. Today, in nursing, as well as in medicine and other social sciences, neuroanatomy, neurobiology and neurophysiology have replaced interpersonal dynamics as keys to understanding human behavior. Yet concerns are being raised that the teaching, research and practice of the critical importance of healing relationships have been overridden by a biological focus on the experiences of health and illness. As a way to move forward, we return to Hildegard Peplau's seminal ideas about the transformative power of relationships in nursing. We propose that Peplau's formulations and, in particular, her seminal Interpersonal Relations in Nursing can provide direction. We do not propose that her formulations or her book be simply transposed from the 1950s to today's classroom and clinic. But we do believe that her ideas and writings are dynamic documents containing concepts and derived operations that can be brought to life in clinical practice. Finally, we explore Peplau's transformative idea that nursing is, at its core, an interpersonal process both to acknowledge an idea that has shaped our past and can guide us into our future.

Cultivating constituencies: the story of the East Harlem Nursing and Health Service, 1928-1941.

I examine the history of the East Harlem Nursing and Health Service in New York City from its beginnings as a demonstration project in 1922 to its closing in 1941. I explore the less tangible goals, needs, and ambitions of the many different constituents that paid for, delivered, and received health care services. I place these goals, needs, and ambitions as critically important drivers of ultimate success or failure. The East Harlem Nursing and Health Service gained international fame among public health leaders for its innovative and independent nursing practice and teaching. However, it ultimately failed because its commitment was to a particular disciplinary mission that did not meet the needs of the constituent communities it served. From 1928 to 1941, the service focused more on the educational advancement of public health nursing and less on addressing the real health care needs of those in East Harlem.

History counts: how history can shape our understanding of health policy.

Historians of nursing can inform and provide perspective and context to the discipline and to policy makers. This article provides several examples of the interplay of history and health policy debates across time and place. From issues of the nursing workforce to discussions about the skill level needed to safely care for patients and the issues of practice boundaries, history provides evidence for shaping our understanding of and engagement with health policy. History offers a way to understand the present and think about the future. It illustrates a critical perspective for both action and advocacy.

Lessons learned? Nurses and health demonstration projects in New York City, 1920-1935.

This historical case study looks at two foundation-funded health demonstration projects in New York City from 1920 to 1935. It specifically examines the disciplinary interests, the work, and the aspirations of nurses and social workers as they tried to provide coordinated and cost-effective care to the individuals and families with whom they worked. It attends to the processes--not just the outcomes--involved in the coming together and moving apart of the different organizations, disciplinary interests, knowledge domains, and spheres of public and private responsibilities involved in caring for those in need. It locates the problems of coordination within disciplinary tensions as nurses and social worker--working within a web of gender, class, race, and power--sought to advance their own disciplinary interests even as they searched for better ways to care for the families in their charge.