Creative Nursing: History and Future Directions

This article traces the development of Creative Nursing from its origin in 1981 as a newsletter about Primary Nursing to its current position as a quarterly international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, indexed, themed journal that continues to nurture novice authors, welcome international submissions, review articles that other journals won't consider, and address subjects that many journals avoid. Future directions include content in multiple languages, new author guidelines that invite submissions of research methods papers, moving beyond statistical significance based on p-value thresholds, asking authors to make explicit the implications for knowledge translation in their papers, and thinking creatively about how artificial intelligence can be leveraged for research, education, and practice.

Uncovering and Expressing our Purpose

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is currently a source of angst, because of its ability to give us content that sounds uncannily like a real person, and because of concern that people will not stop at using it as a tool to generate and synthesize ideas, but instead will cede control over our words, and then our thoughts. This editorial details each article in Creative Nursing Vol. 30 Issue 2, highlighting the ways in which social media, different kinds of AI, and other tools for connectivity can be used for good: finding our purpose, uniting people over long distances, expediting knowledge implementation, managing large volumes of literature, advancing health equity, and enriching nursing education.

A Dynamic and Inclusive Approach

After a year of transition to a new publisher, Creative Nursing 2024 will build on our legacy of nurturing novice authors with a Student Article of the Year initiative; presenting courageous discourse as reflected in our overarching theme for the year, The Impact of Social Forces on Nursing and Health; and publishing even more new knowledge in the form of research and discussion of nursing theories and models. This issue's theme, Activism, Advocacy, and Allyship, is exemplified by articles about paths to a nursing workforce that reflect the people we serve, and about concepts such as hygge, dialectical pluralism, acculturative stress, shared decision-making for breast health, nature immersion, iceberg demographics, and self-care in palliative care.

Life on the Margins

This editorial reviews the events of Creative Nursing's 2023 publication year, importantly our transition to Sage Publishing, and the expanded opportunities this new relationship provides in 2024 and beyond. The 11 articles in this theme issue about marginalization are summarized and connected.

The Structures of Caring

The World Health Organization defines social determinants of health as "the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life." This current journal issue has the theme of structural determinants of health. In 2016 (Creative Nursing Vol. 22), we published 49 articles in four issues addressing Determinants of Health: Social Determinants, Structural Determinants, Caregiver Determinants, and Global Determinants. This editorial presents the highlights of those four journal issues, then connects each of the articles in this current issue to the theme; these articles reveal the systems and structures that support our caring from many angles, levels, and perspectives. Readers are challenged to recognize the potential, embedded in every system and structure, for disparities in the provision of our care.

How Wise is Conventional Wisdom?

This editorial connects each article in this issue to the theme, Challenging Long-Held Assumptions, by raising questions. How do we really determine value in health care? How do good, new ideas make it into practice? Why the untapped potential of Doctor of Nursing Practice preparation? Can we actually teach nursing students creativity? Do virtual group appointments actually work? How in the world do families care for loved ones at home on mechanical ventilation? Can nursing educators truly decolonize their own thinking? Is simulation a poor substitute for clinical placements, or just as good and sometimes better? Can the power of social media be used for good? Can simulation actually make new nurses more likely to call a code when it's needed? How can farm animals help people dealing with mental illness? And a question crucial to us all as human beings: Can forgiveness ever be bad?

Righteous Among the Nations: Honoring Spiritual Resistance in a Time of Pandemics

Telling the stories of people who risked their lives to save victims of the Holocaust through music is the focus of a project called The Garden of the Righteous. This project was introduced in a recent article in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, called “Righteous Among the Nations: Music Without Borders” (Eisner et al., 2019). This piece provides an update on the evolution of the project during a time of pandemics.

Righteous Among the Nations: Music Without Borders

The Garden of the Righteous, a program presented by Naye Strunes, a Minneapolis-based Yiddish music ensemble, weaves together original Yiddish music and stories of fearless individuals from among the thousands of non-Jews who risked their lives to save innocent people during the Holocaust. The program gives audience members an opportunity to reflect on the extent of courage and compassion during dark times. All proceeds are given to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), a contemporary humanitarian organization that provides medical assistance to populations experiencing crises. This article explores the concept of righteousness among the nations, particularly in the context of partnership scholarship; the history and present-day renaissance of Yiddish language, music, and culture; and Médecins Sans Frontières as a contemporary example of living courageously.

Partnerships in Sustainability: The Transition Town Movement in Minnesota

Transition Towns is a citizen-led movement that seeks to address individual and societal dependence on fossil fuels and the need to reduce greenhouse gas production in order to fight climate change. The foundation of Transition is permaculture, a design process based on whole-systems thinking informed by the patterns and relationships found in nature. Since its inception in 2005, the Transition movement has spread worldwide, as people in small groups and across large towns look for ways to take practical action to fight climate change: from home vegetable gardens to weatherization work parties, from time banks and tool shares to renewable energy systems. Transition looks different in every location because it meets the needs and draws on the skills of the local community. This article looks at Transition in one community: The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, profiling several Transition Town groups.

Quarterly Publication, and Invitation to Artists

The mission of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies is to be an anthology for scholarly writing about the art and science of partnership, with contributions from both academicians and practitioners. Our vision is to be a vehicle for cultural transformation from domination to partnership. We are moving to a quarterly publication schedule in 2016, and invite artists in all media to participate in the partnership movement by submitting cover art.

Welcome to the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies

Welcome to the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, dedicated to sharing new knowledge and successful applications of Riane Eisler’s partnership paradigm: a new perspective on human possibilities increasingly utilized, explored, and expanded by others.

Story: an intimate human resource

The significance of story in providing therapeutic, person-centered care and the centrality of relationship in obtaining stories are explored in this issue of Creative Nursing. Authors explain narrative medicine, narrative nursing, and the narrative reflective process as used in education, a research cluster, and a program to help nurses thrive amid stress. Nurses tell their own and others' stories of courage, compassion for the dying, immersion in another culture, and grieving adverse life events.

Broader Relationship, Larger Story

The health of populations and the cultures that characterize them are part of nursing’s Timeless Wisdom, historically, today, and in the future. In this issue of Creative Nursing, we examine the concepts of culture, self and other, and health promotion, and explore our relationships among underserved and at-risk communities.

Transformation Through Relationships

Relationship with self, with colleagues, and with patients and their families, along with an emerging professional relationship with community, are described in articles by nurse educators, organizational leaders, and an entrepreneur from diverse locations and settings all devoted to preparing, empowering, and sustaining nurses and those for whom we care.