Meditations on Hope: Nurses' Stories about Motivation and Inspiration (Kaplan Voices Nurses). This item is unavailable.Meditations on Hope: Nurses' Stories about Motivation and Inspiration (Kaplan Voices Nurses)

There are over three million nurses in the United States who deal with a multitude of issues every day, from patient suffering and death to the stress of dealing with insurance companies. With a growing shortage of nurses, finding inspiration and keeping hope alive is necessary for nurses to keep up their morale and to have a good quality of life outside of the workplace. In Meditations on Hope, nurses from a variety of specialties share their tales of staying positive and focused, maintaining hope in the face of patients' suffering, triumphing over tragedy, overcoming adversities and challenges, and developing relationships that bring hope, understanding, and healing to themselves and their loved ones. Nurses-from hospitals, private practices, and in home health care-tell about how they keep their faith and hope in the healing process, in the face of patients' suffering. Hear from people new to the field as well as those who have been in nursing for decades about the cases that have buoyed their spirits and those that require their greatest reserve of strength.

Paula Sergi, BSN, MFA, was selected by the Hessen Literary Society as the Wisconsin writer to act as the 2005 Cultural Ambassador for the Hessen-Wisconsin Writers Exchange. She is the author of Family Business, a collection of poems, and she co-edited Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, University of Iowa Press, 1999. Sergi received a Wisconsin Arts Board Artist Fellowship in 2001. Her poetry is published regularly in such journals as The Bellevue Literary Review, Primavera, Crab Orchard Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review and her writing has been featured recently in the American Journal of Nursing. She worked as a staff nurse at University of Wisconsin Hospitals, as a public health nurse with various county departments, and as a visiting nurse in Portland, Oregon. Now she focuses her time as a teacher and writer. She teaches creative writing at Ripon College, and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Geraldine Gorman, RN, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds an M.A. in English Literature and a Ph.D. in Nursing, both from Loyola University, Chicago. Before coming to UIC in 2002, she taught at Western Michigan University. Prior to entering the nursing profession in 1991, she taught writing as a teaching assistant at Loyola University. She also worked in direct social services, living in community at the Little Brothers of the Poor and participating in all aspects of their service to low-income elderly, including meal delivery, relocation services, and holiday and vacation celebrations. In this capacity she also facilitated poetry workshops in nursing homes, resulting in two small anthologies of collected work. She was a founding member of a small grass roots organization in Tempe, AZ, which served the needs of the many relocated elderly and she organized the local university community to provide, among other services, respi