18th Annual International Philosophy of Nursing Conference

in association with the International Philosophy of Nursing Society
(IPONS)
September 8th, 9th and 10th, 2014

Hosted by the School of Health Sciences, University of Nottingham, England, UK

Brave new world?
Health, technology and evidence based practice

Nurses have seen some fundamental changes in the way that healthcare is delivered. 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 that these technologies interact with the human dimension does, and should, require critical analysis.This is particularly the case 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 health care 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 that there is an empiricist and dehumanising process involved in these developments. For example, what happens to the complexity of ethical debates when they are 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 health care?

This conference intends to examine these and other issues related to ‘Health, technology, and evidence-based practice’.

CONFERENCE DETAILS

Details of the Conference can now be found at the following link: ...

These details include the list of Keynote speakers; the venue; a Call for Abstracts; conference registration and accommodation, and transportation. Abstracts of the Keynote speakers and the full Conference Programme will be available soon on the above link.

Any specific queries should be addressed to Dr Stuart Nairn ...

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