Anthropology of Nursing: Exploring Cultural Concepts in Practice
ISBN: 9781315691787
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited



This book aims to introduce nurses and other healthcare professionals to how anthropology can help them understand nursing as a profession and as a culture.

Drawing on key anthropological concepts, the book facilitates the understanding and critical consideration of nursing practice, as seen across a wide range of health care contexts, and which impacts the delivery of appropriate care for service users. Considering the fields in which nurses work, the book argues that in order for nurses to optimize their roles as deliverers of patient care, they must not only engage with the realities of the cultural world of the patient, but also that of their own multi-professional cultural environment.

The only book currently in the field on anthropology of nursing, this book will be a valuable resource for nursing students at all academic levels, especially where they can pursue specific modules in the subject, as well as those other students pursuing medical anthropology courses. As well as this, it will be an essential text for those post-graduate students who wish to consider alternative world views from anthropology and their application in nursing and healthcare, in addition to their undertaking ethnographic research to explore nursing in all its fields of practice.


Karen Holland is Editor in Chief of the journal Nurse Education in Practice and holds a position as part-time lecturer at the University of Salford in the School of Health and Society. She has written and edited a number of books for nurses and other health professionals.

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