Promoting Healing and Resilience in People with Cancer: A Nursing Perspective

This is the first Nursing book on cancer care designed around a conceptual model of whole person care.  Key concepts are stress, healing, resilience and health. As a clinical model, nursing goals, desired outcomes, key concepts and proposed psychosocial interventions with patients and family caregivers,  advance the practice of clinical nursing toward a more comprehensive understanding  of the whole person with cancer and their loved ones. As a model for teaching nursing students about chronic illness, it provides a scientific basis for students to learn how to assess and care for the whole person   and his loved one. As a model for clinical research in the field of cancer care, it serves as a predicate for the development, evaluation and interpretation of clinical interventions. The model is a dynamic framework that both informs and is informed by research findings. It is hoped that future research findings will reveal the optimal combination of interventions to provide comprehensive care across clinical contexts. With a patient-centred humanistic focus anchored by the quality of the nurse patient and family caregiver relationships, it is hoped that the nurse's technical, procedural and medical expertise may complement rather than define the nurse's approach to the whole patient and family.   

The book is structured to facilitate the reader's easy access to needed information. Each chapter examines a key concept of the model, and is organized around an introduction, learning objectives, definitions, and relevant research findings that serve as the scientific predicate for suggested interventions discussed in Part 4, Nursing approaches. Clinical and personal anecdotes, tables and figures illustrate the concepts under discussion.   

Nurse practitioners, clinic nurse specialists, nursing professors, graduate students, and nurse researchers may find this book a useful reference for conceptualizing whole person care, and for determining relevant interventions that promote healing, resilience and health. But it is also relevant for family doctors and fourth year students learning to care for the whole person with a chronic illness.

• Whole person cancer care
• Integrative nursing care
• Nursing interventions in cancer care
• Nursing strategies and emotional distress
• Conceptual model of nursing practice
• Fostering Innate and self- induced healing
• Facilitating meaning making
• Nurse-patient relationship
• Strengthening supportive relationships
• Biological and psychological adaptation to adversity
• Relaxation response technique and cancer care
• Fostering patient resilience
• Therapeutic touch in cancer care
• Nursing and cancer care

• Retired, Ingram School of Nursing, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

  Mary Grossman

        Mary Grossman PhD was an Assistant Professor at McGill University's Ingram School of Nursing and its affiliated university hospitals. During the1990s, Dr Grossman served in a number of leadership positions. Notably, she held the Chair as Associate Director of Programs and Practice (Undergraduate & Graduate Nursing). In this capacity, she shepherded the revision of the undergraduate Baccalaureate nursing science curriculum and was instrumental in establishing a Committee to develop the First Nurse Practitioner Program at McGill University in intensive care, with the first student cohort starting in Sept 1999. In her capacity as Director of Clinical practice, Dr Grossman promoted academic practice throughout the McGill nursing hospital and community network. Dr Grossman was Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, and also served as Nursing Director (Surgical areas) at McGill University's Royal Victoria Hospital. More recently, as Co director of the Brojde Centre for lung cancer patients (2008-2012), Dr Grossman had the opportunity to integrate two academic pursuits: the development of a conceptual model tailored to the whole person living with cancer and creating   a clinical environment conducive to academic practice.   Under Dr Grossman's tutelage the Centre moved  to integrative cancer care, based on  a  working model that began to delineate  the theoretical scope of whole person care.  Student nurses seeking advanced university degrees could test out related concepts of nursing care through their clinical rotations and Master's based clinical research.  A more elaborated explicated nursing model serves as the theoretical and scientific predicate for the book on stress, healing and resilience in people with cancer: A Nursing perspective.   Since retirement at the end of 2012, Dr Grossman has been invited on several occasions to present her thinking to graduate nursing and final year medical students.  Dr Grossman is a published author, invited speaker and has been involved in various clinical research studies throughout her career.