Promoting Healing and Resilience in People with Cancer: A Nursing Perspective

Book excerpt: This is the first Nursing book on cancer care designed around a conceptual model of whole person care. Key concepts are stress, healing, resilience and health. As a clinical model, nursing goals, desired outcomes, key concepts and proposed psychosocial interventions with patients and family caregivers, advance the practice of clinical nursing toward a more comprehensive understanding of the whole person with cancer and their loved ones. As a model for teaching nursing students about chronic illness, it provides a scientific basis for students to learn how to assess and care for the whole person and his loved one. As a model for clinical research in the field of cancer care, it serves as a predicate for the development, evaluation and interpretation of clinical interventions. The model is a dynamic framework that both informs and is informed by research findings. It is hoped that future research findings will reveal the optimal combination of interventions to provide comprehensive care across clinical contexts. With a patient-centred humanistic focus anchored by the quality of the nurse patient and family caregiver relationships, it is hoped that the nurse's technical, procedural and medical expertise may complement rather than define the nurse's approach to the whole patient and family. The book is structured to facilitate the reader's easy access to needed information. Each chapter examines a key concept of the model, and is organized around an introduction, learning objectives, definitions, and relevant research findings that serve as the scientific predicate for suggested interventions discussed in Part 4, Nursing approaches. Clinical and personal anecdotes, tables and figures illustrate the concepts under discussion. Nurse practitioners, clinic nurse specialists, nursing professors, graduate students, and nurse researchers may find this book a useful reference for conceptualizing whole person care, and for determining relevant interventions that promote healing, resilience and health. But it is also relevant for family doctors and fourth year students learning to care for the whole person with a chronic illness.