Parish Nursing

Provides a variety of perspectives on faith community nursing roles and practice.

Provides an overview of the current state of parish nursing, exploring the spiritual call to the parish nursing ministry, a spiritual history of parish nursing, and the role of the parish nurse as a "spiritual companion" in health and illness. Topics include the parish nurse's own spirituality, needs of diverse populations, homebound adults, and the hospitalised parishioner.

Parish Nursing is a handbook on health promotion and care within faith communities. Sections of the book address the context for parish or congregational nursing; models, roles, and settings for practice; issues for parish nursing practice; the parish nurse′s collaboration with other health team and spiritual care professionals; and international perspectives of parish nursing. While the project had its initial roots in the Lutheran General Care System, it has been written so that nurses of all faiths should find it an extremely useful shelf reference or advanced-level text. Parish Nursing will be of interest to scholars, students, and advanced practitioners in community and public health nursing, psychiatric/mental health nursing, and primary care nursing. Originally published as Parish Nursing: The Developing Practice.

Written by a multidisciplinary panel of experts, this comprehensive text and reference presents a fundamental understanding of all aspects of parish nursing, providing in-depth information essential to understanding the ministry of a parish nursing practice. This is the only text in parish nursing that addresses the role of the parish nurse administrator, and includes suggested policies and procedures as well as recommendations for competency development for parish nurses.

This unique text combines traditional parish nursing content with community health nursing methodology, coverage of community and faith community assessment, and health education and health promotion/disease prevention programming.

Make parish nursing an alternative to shrinking healthcare resources! Because of shrinking healthcare resources, both human and monetary, parish nurses in the future will be called upon to deal with rising numbers of elderly and the end-of-life issues that accompany aging. Parish Nursing: A Handbook for the New Millennium is a guide to designing programs that can complement a congregation's ministry priorities for senior adults, identifying strengths to reinforce and weaknesses to avoid. Stories from the fields of service capture the sweat equity and history of the re-emergence of nursing in churches. Parish Nursing: A Handbook for the New Millennium is a practical planning guide for parish nurses and congregational committee members with limited experience in program development. Suitable for use with multiple faith traditions, the book demonstrates how to take responsibility for health ministries without leaning on direction from local hospitals. Parish Nursing presents multiple practice models, intervention strategies, and methods of program evaluation responsive to boundaries and traditions of various communities of faith. Parish Nursing includes: conceptual frameworks program design options outlines from field-tested training modules program evaluation options and challenges and much more! In 2001, there were 35 million people over the age of 65 living in the United States—a number that’s expected to double in the next 10 years. The American Academy of Family Physicians estimates that nearly 20 percent of family doctors are no longer accepting new Medicare patients. Parish Nursing: A Handbook for the New Millennium is an essential resource for nurses, pastors, and church leaders starting a parish nurse ministry to deal with the growing number of “forgotten” elderly persons.

Parish Nursing presents a vision where nurses can serve as the vital link between secular healthcare and sacred faith-based systems. Nurses are able to provide direct ministry to members of the congregation and also can be the communicators, teachers, motivators, and encouragers of others. The parish nurse could be a key person to link the two systems and provide truly wholistic care. Reading the stories of parish nurses gives us hope that this vision might be possible—indeed must be possible—if our aging society is to flourish in the years ahead.

A multi-authored book, with editors and authors who are leaders in Faith Community Nursing (FCN) that aims to address contemporary issues in faith-based, whole person, community based health offering cost effective, accessible, patient centered care along the patient continuum while challenging contemporary health policy to include more health promotion services. Twenty-five chapters take the reader from a foundational understanding of this historic grass-roots movement to the present day international specialty nursing practice. The book is structured into five sections that describe both the historical advancement of the Faith Community Nursing, its current implications and future challenges, taking into account the perspectives of the pastor, congregation, nurse, health care system and public health national and international organizations. The benefits of this book are that it is intended for a mixed audience including lay, academic, medical professionals or health care executives. By changing the mindset of the reader to see the nurse as more than providing illness care, the faith community as more than a place one goes to on Sunday and health as more than physical, creative alternatives for promoting health emerge through Faith Community Nursing.