Celebrate Birth!-Amazing Grace: Remembering Pregnancy and Birth.

Our daughter and son were born at the Maternity Center in NYC in 1986 and 1989, respectively. I am grateful to the exceptional care and freedom the nurse midwives were able to provide to our family. What follows is the expression of that deeply personal and profound experience, which will hopefully remind and inspire women of the truly individual and extraordinary gift of birth.

Facilitating Social Integration for People With Severe Mental Illness Served by Assertive Community Treatment.

Purpose: This article explores the experience of workers on Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams surrounding their efforts to facilitate social integration for their clients.

Design And Methods: Sixteen workers were individually interviewed and eight additional workers participated in two focus groups.

Findings: The formation of caring relationships between worker and client was an important first step towards social integration for ACT clients.

Exploring nurses' personal dignity, global self-esteem and work satisfaction.

Background: This study examines nurses' perceptions of dignity in themselves and their work. Nurses commonly assert concern for human dignity as a component of the patients' experience rather than as necessary in the nurses' own lives or in the lives of others in the workplace. This study is exploratory and generates potential relationships for further study and theory generation in nursing.

Articulating the value of psychiatric community health nurse interventions: a secondary analysis.

The purpose of this secondary analysis of qualitative data was to discover and articulate the nature and value of therapeutic nursing interventions (TNIs) utilized by psychiatric community health nurses (PCHNs). PCHNs encounter ethical conflict when faced with increasingly strict payment limitations on nursing practice (Sturm, 2004). This new analysis provides evidence of how TNIs, executed with a high level of sensitivity and skill, enable the PCHN to address and effectively manage the complex healthcare needs of patients with chronic mental illness.

Ethics and care: an ethnographic study of psychiatric community health nursing practice.

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to explore, describe, and document the practice of a group of psychiatric community health nurses (CHNs), and to provide a forum through which their voices could be heard. Discovery of the nature of issues CHNs experience in an effort to meet the needs of patients with mental illness was the focus. The paper describes the ethical conflict experienced by many of these nurses who wanted to provide beneficial, high-quality care to patients with mental illness but encountered obstacles in practice.