Millennials usher us in: Nursing and the emerging virtual environment of care

Abstract

The nursing profession is a complex living system that must continually regenerate and redefine itself to remain viable and to meet emerging environmental challenges. As nursing care of patients moves iteratively from the home to the hospital and now into cyberspace, higher education is necessarily driven to cultivate student growth intrinsically, intellectually, and technologically to accommodate these new contexts of care. Reconceptualizing the nursing paradigm to include basic tenets of quantum physics, the science underlying virtual technology, will foster renewal of the nursing profession and its virtual component, and augment the already heightened consciousness of a new generation of students.

Geographical thinking in nursing inquiry, part two: performance, possibility, and non‐representational theory

“…Current alignments with such thinking in nursing research are quite focused, concerned with how technologies bridge physical distances – thus compressing space‐time – and create new virtual cyber spaces for nursing education and practice (Barnes & Rudge, ; Mugavin, ). Questions arise including how lacking physical co‐presence, online education might involve a different – perhaps lesser – interactive energy and interpersonal ‘fizz’.…”