Nursing Philosophy: Call for papers for Special Issue

Brave new world? Health, technology and evidence based practice

Guest Editor: Stuart Nain
Submission deadline 1
st
J une 2015
Body care is at the centre of nursing practice but the nature of that care has been extended
beyond the personal, human-to-human contact, and is increasingly refracted through the
medium of technological/scientific interventions. The way these technologies interact with
the human dimension does, and should, require critical analysis, particularly for nurses who
are increasingly expected to adopt methods and approaches that change the nature of the
nurse patient relationship. Added to this is the way that clinicians/academics/researchers
interact with healthcare issues, locally as well as globally.
There is an established debate and tension within the evidence based practice literature that
illustrates a deep ambivalence about how a holistic approach to clinical practice relates to,
enhances, or is undermined by the new health technologies. These include care pathways,
systematic reviews of knowledge, the enabling/disabling effects of technology and the
putative implication of an empiricist and dehumanising process inherent in these
developments. For example, what happens to the complexity of ethical debates when shaped
in the form of arguments based on literature reviews? These may wittingly or unwittingly
serve as a means of translating complex moral issues into usable clinical regimes that
partially mimic meta-analyses. Furthermore we may ask what place narrative knowledge and
qualitative experiences may have in this new world of implementation technologies? And
how do the new interventions of telemedicine and other policy drivers that emphasise the
"hospital-at-home" impact on the ways that nurses carry out healthcare?
Papers are now invited for consideration for a special issue of Nursing Philosophy that
develops this theme. Manuscripts should be prepared and submitted in accordance with the
journal author guidelines and will be subject to the usual peer-review process. When
submitting your manuscript please state that the article is for the special issue: Brave new
world? Health, technology and evidence based practice. The deadline for submission of
manuscripts is 1
st
June 2015.
Authors who would like to discuss their ideas for a paper to be considered for this themed
issue are welcome to contact stuart.nairn@nottingham.ac.uk