Men and women managing coronary artery disease risk: urban-rural contrasts.

People's beliefs about health and making lifestyle changes associated with risk reduction and disease prevention can vary based on their gender and ethnocultural affiliation. Our objective was to describe and explain how gender and ethnocultural affiliation influence the process that people undergo when faced with making lifestyle changes related to their coronary artery disease (CAD) risk. A series of grounded theory studies were undertaken in Alberta, Canada, with men and women from five ethnocultural groups diagnosed with CAD.

Health beliefs of rural Canadians: implications for practice.

Objective: The objective of the present study was to examine the health beliefs, values and practices of rural residents living in two geographically diverse regions of western Canada.

Design: An ethnographic study with semistructured interviews of 55 persons was conducted with participants ranging in age from 19 to 84 years.

Results: Being healthy was described as having balance in one's life, taking into consideration the relationship between the physical, mental, social, and spiritual aspects of the person.

Maximizing the involvement of rural nurses in policy.

Rural health issues are increasingly recognized as needing attention, but many health policies in Canada are developed for the urban context and universally applied to rural settings. Addressing rural nurses' opportunities for involvement in policy will contribute to our general understanding of rural health while improving community health services. Rural nurses are in a unique position to assist because of their intimate knowledge of their communities and their position as informal community leaders.

The lived experience of families of children who are failing to thrive.

Objective: This study was conducted to explore the experience of families of children who were failing to thrive. The aim of the study was not to generalize the findings but to generate a rich description of the phenomenon of living with children who were not growing as expected.

Background: Although failure to thrive has been found to have long-term negative implications for children there is little information available on how families experience this phenomenon.

Clinical innovation for promoting family care in paediatric intensive care: demonstration, role modelling and reflective practice.

Aim: To explore family caregiving problems in paediatric crisis care and methods that could be applied to move the abstraction of family care to development of specific family interventions.

Background And Rational: Family centred care has been accepted as the ideal philosophy for holistic health care of children, but methods for its implementation are not well established. In paediatric health crises, family care requires special sensitivity to family needs and a type of complex nursing care for which many practitioners are not sufficiently prepared.