While care is normally quantified as a series of actions to promote wellbeing of patients, healthcare professionals know that there is much more that cannot be quantified and indeed, is almost never recorded. These are the ineffable moments, the unworded emotions, and the intense human connections that resonate when there is caring.
There exists a deep need for healthcare professionals to publicly honor their practice and share the human to human values that characterize caring within the contemporary healthcare environment. Art and aesthetic expression promote physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing in those who create and in those who share the creation itself (see papers by Patterson, Clift, Lane, and McCaffrey). Works of art and all types of aesthetic expression are thus a necessity throughout healthcare, and indeed, throughout life.
The Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Nursing and Health Sciences was created as a forum for nurses, physicians, educators, administrators, social workers and those in the health sciences to express the caring they find within their practice. The first issue of this multi-media leading-edge, fully online journal was published in the Fall of 2013.
The Journal wraps its pages around transcendent moments that are shared in the form of poetry, artwork, music, dance, sculpture and philosophical expositions. These aesthetic expressions are offered to the world to honor and encourage professionals to reveal the complexity of caring in healthcare and to provide a venue that identifies with this invisible labor of the heart.
As editors, we would like to extend an invitation to you. Please consider submitting your own aesthetic expression for consideration for the next issue of the Journal. Nurses, physicians, administrators, and persons from all areas of healthcare are invited to share what matters about their caring in the form of poetry, music, sculpture, and all forms of visual art. Your contribution will receive a blinded peer-review by our international panel. There is no fee for submission and no charge for the Journal.
Caring that is expressed creatively in art and aesthetics demonstrates, affirms, and exemplifies possibilities and hopes for living for both for patients and for those who daily care for them. We hope you will join us and share your own expressions of and reflections on caring.
Sincerely,
Marguerite J. Purnell, PhD, RN; AHN-BC
Rozzano C. Locsin, PhD, RN, FAAN
Editors, Journal of Art and Aesthetics in Nursing and Health Sciences
This post was written by:
Marguerite J. Purnell, PhD, RN; AHN-BC is an Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing. She serves on multiple international journal editorial boards and publishes nationally and internationally on holistic nursing and caring intentionality. She is co-editor of the book “A Contemporary Nursing Process: The (Un)Bearable Weight of Knowing in Nursing.”
Rozzano C. Locsin, PhD, RN; FAAN is a Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing. He is member of national and international editorial and advisory boards of published journals on topics about holistic nursing, caring, international/global health nursing. He is author of the middle-range theory Technological Competency as Caring in Nursing.
