Covenantal Care: Nursing with God's Love and Justice.

With resources stretched thin and the growing risk of compassion fatigue, faith beliefs can offer enriching perspectives for nurses. Covenantal care is a nursing approach rooted in theological insights about humanity's inherent purpose to engage in relationship with God and actively participate in acts of love and justice. Based upon interpretations of Judeo-Christian teachings of imago Dei and God's covenant with humankind, this approach provides guidance for the nurse to care for self, patients, and the wider community.

Reframing covenant for nursing: From individual commitments to covenant with society.

Today's constrained healthcare environment can make it very difficult for nurses to provide compassionate, competent, and ethical care, and yet their continued commitment to care is viewed as requisite. Nurses' commitment to care of patients, enmeshed with professional identity, may be understood as heroic. A few nursing scholars have advanced the concept of a nurse-patient covenant to explain or inspire nurses' commitment to care.

How Grounded Are Our Ideals? Rethinking Nursing's Covenant of Care.

Covenant has been used to describe the special relationship between nurses and patients yet has been misunderstood in nursing literature. Covenantal elements of keeping promises and nurturing relationship resonate with the work of nursing. However, unlimited devotion puts the nurse at risk for exploitation and burnout.

'The Elephant on the Table': Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Home Health Services.

Healthcare services are increasingly being provided in the home. At the same time, these home contexts are changing as global migration has brought unprecedented diversity both in the recipients of care, and home health workers. In this paper, we present findings of a Canadian study that examined the negotiation of religious and ethnic plurality in home health.

Returning home: historical influences on home healthcare in Canada.

In this article, the historical context of home healthcare in early 20th century Canada is examined with an emphasis on key events and groups that shaped nursing in the home as the primary form of healthcare. Ways in which home healthcare evolved are also addressed, including the movement from an emphasis on the home as the point of care for both preventative and curative services, to the separation of healthcare functions into public health, treatment of illness and injury, and pregnancy care-each with its own practitioners and regulators as hospital-based systems became the desirable norm. We conclude that the nature and status of home-based nursing evolved in response to public expectations of what comprised "best care" and who was responsible for providing (and funding) it.