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"Florence Nightingale and the medical men - working together for health care reform" by Lynn McDonald is a well-researched assessment of Florence Nightingale's collaborations with members of the British medical profession. McDonald's work provides a nuanced understanding of Nightingale's contributions to both civilian and military healthcare, challenging previous historical scholarship and offering correctives to simplistic interpretations. The book explores Nightingale's relationships with military medical officers, her public health collaborations, and her role in mediating the relationship between nursing and medicine. McDonald's analysis of Nightingale's attitudes towards nurse-registration and germ theory is particularly impressive. Overall, the book is a valuable contribution to the fields of nursing and medical history and will be of interest to researchers, students, and anyone interested in Nightingale's work in the medical realm. [Extracted from the article]

Current health policy, high‐profile failures and increased media scrutiny have led to a significant focus on patient experience in Britain's National Health Service (NHS). Patient experience data is typically gathered through surveys of satisfaction. The study aimed to support a better understanding of the patient experience and patients' expression of it through consideration of the aspects of the patient experience on NHS wards which are by their nature impossible to capture through patient satisfaction surveys. Existential phenomenology was used to develop an in‐depth exploratory narrative, expressed through the voices of the participants. Data collection involved in‐depth face‐to‐face interviews with 12 purposively sampled participants, with analysis by means of hermeneutics. Though the individuality of each experience was apparent and cannot be overemphasised, common factors emerging from the data included uncertainty and unexpectedness, suffering and finitude, the futility of feedback and bureaucracy and absurdity. Overall, participants demonstrated how their individual personalities and expectations affected their response both to illness or injury and to their hospital admissions, highlighting feelings of vulnerability and voicelessness as a response to hospitalisation. The findings of this study provide useful insight into the patient experience on British hospital wards, and the value of an existential–phenomenological approach is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the participation of young people in the Scottish Children's Hearings system, which combines juvenile justice and child welfare. Considers several dimensions of participation in relation to the system and other arenas of decision making. Suggests that participation rights may be more of a reality for young people involved in welfare systems than for others in the UK. (JPB)

The purpose of this contemporary history study is to analyse nursing strategy documents produced by NHS Trusts in England in the period 2009–2013, through a process of discourse analysis. In 2013 the Francis Report on the Mid‐Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was published. The Report highlighted the full range of organisational failures in a Trust that valued financial efficiency over patient care. The analysis that followed, however, dwelt heavily on the failings of the nurses. Nursing strategy documents at that time served to set the future direction for NHS Trusts, prescribing specific value frameworks for each nursing workforce. However, the values chosen frequently conflicted with each other pitting nursing values against a managerial trope. It is argued that documents provided a response to wider NHS concerns and high‐profile failures in care, particularly the Francis Report, paying lip service to staff engagement whilst maintaining a corporate focus. Nursing values were placed firmly within a managerialist discourse, one that has needed to be re‐evaluated in the current Covid‐19 pandemic. Wider implications of the research suggest discussion of value conflict may be beneficial within nursing education and a truly local approach to strategy creation would potentially promote staff buy‐in to strategy documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY A new book provides a visual history of nursing from its roots 2,000 years ago until today. Keywords Ancient times * Dark ages * Modern times * Nursing history [...]

During the Korean War (1950-1953) the Norwegian government sent a mobile army surgical hospital (MASH) to support the efforts of the United Nations (UN) Army. From the first, its status was ambiguous. The US-led military medical services believed that the "Norwegian Mobile Army Surgical Hospital" (NORMASH) was no different from any other MASH; but both its originators and its staff regarded it as a vehicle for humanitarian aid. Members of the hospital soon recognized that their status in the war zone was primarily that of a military field hospital. Yet they insisted on providing essential medical care to the local civilian population as well as trauma care to UN soldiers and prisoners of war. The ambiguities that arose from the dual mission of NORMASH are explored in this article, which pays particular attention to the experiences of nurses, as expressed in three types of source: their contemporary letters to their Matron-in-Chief; a report written by one nurse shortly after the war; and a series of oral history interviews conducted approximately 60 years later. The article concludes that the nurses of NORMASH experienced no real role-conflict. They viewed it as natural that they should offer their services to both military and civilian casualties according to need, and they experienced a sense of satisfaction from their work with both types of patient. Ultimately, the experience of Norwegian nurses in Korea illustrates the powerful sense of personal agency that could be experienced by nurses in forward field hospitals, where political decision-making did not impinge too forcefully on their clinical and ethical judgment as clinicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]