Optimal healing environments in nursing

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore nursing's historical legacy as a caring-healing profession, and the meaning, significance, and consequences of optimal healing environments for modern nursing practice, education and research. Described are the core foci of nursing as a discipline: what it means to be a person and experience personhood; the meaning of health at the individual, family, and societal levels; how environments create or diminish the potential for the promotion, maintenance, or restoration of well-being; and the caring-healing therapeutics of nursing. Each of these domains are described and discussed in the context of caring, healing environments. It is argued that caring and healing are phenomena difficult to confer or enact in isolation from one another. For nursing, embracing a caring-healing framework incorporates attending to the wholeness of humans in their everyday creation and sustenance of a meaningful life.