Foreword
Good text books have a habit of coming out just after you really needed them, and this book is no exception. My daughter recently qualified as a nurse and, while I recommended many good books to her—and usually had to buy them for her—including several of the mighty tomes on nursing to which I have contributed, I usually gave them with a health warning. Either they were just under the mark or provided too much information that would not be needed at her stage in her university programme. However, the present book edited by Chris Brooker and Anne Waugh could have been recommended without reservation—as I now recommend it to readers of this Foreword.
There is a prevailing opinion, held mostly by people whose opinions are more significant than the evidence on which they base those opinions, that current nursing education is simply stuffing the heads of future nurses full of nonsense; material which they will never need and which leads them astray from the core function of nursing: to care for people. I simply do not accept this argument; my own background is in biological sciences and, along the road to graduating, I studied chemistry (in all its forms), physics, mathematics and statistics. I don’t recall more than an ounce of all that now and have probably never used much of it since but I have never heard a criticism of any programme of study in another discipline expressed in this way. My point is that the contents of the present book - which is foundational—should dispel any doubts about the content and purpose of modern nursing. The ‘nay sayers’ regarding current nursing education will probably be most comfortable starting at the back of the book where absolutely fundamental aspects of nursing practice: safety, infection control, nutrition and elimination (two chapters on this!) are each headlined.
However, what is important for me—if the book is approached the right way round—is that it begins by putting nursing in context, its recent history and professional development. This is surely the right way round: develop the professional and then give them the skills. However, so much of what has happened lately in nursing education in the UK has been an emphasis on a return to skills—albeit their fundamental importance—and a downplaying of the professional and educational aspects. Doing it the other way round, starting with skills in the hope that professional attributes will develop later leads to the ‘why do we/do we really need to know this?’ mentality with which many in nursing education are familiar. Foundations of Nursing Practice approaches its subject matter in the appropriate direction and at the appropriate level. It may have been published just in time for my next daughter to study nursing.