The Christian parable of the Good Samaritan is a masterclass for all health professionals in caring for their patients with sustained commitment to their calling, particularly in our secular age.

Christian and other nurses in the hostile modern and increasingly secular age may feel helpless in an environment that created the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) and continues to foster end of life 'care' through sedation and dehydration. The book aims to enlighten both health professionals and the public alike to their rights of conscience and knowledge of the needs of vulnerable patients whether related to ethical care or guidance and the law which can affect them. Indifference to patients' needs and suffering may be injurious to nurses' health all of whom have a conscience. This must be respected, protected and used as a guide to truly care for the patient's benefit, regardless of laws and professional pathways which may prove harmful to many vulnerable patients. The questioning nurse on ethical issues and dilemmas needs consideration, respect and support when attempting to act as the patient advocate. Managers at all levels need to be aware of the concerns of front line nurses and to be mindful that recruitment and retention are both equally important factors for the quality of patient care and nurse morale and work satisfaction. The NHS was a wonderful creation which is only as good as its staff at all levels. Its managers and government ministers must remember that the more authority invested in them, the more the accountability and transparency expected by both health professionals, their patients and the public.

This book offers a challenge to conventional histories of secularisation by focusing upon the importance of central religious narratives. These narratives are changed significantly over time, but also to have been invested with importance and meaning by religious individuals and organisations as well as by secular ones.

Florence Nightingale is famous as the “lady with the lamp” in the Crimean War, 1854—56. There is a massive amount of literature on this work, but, as editor Lynn McDonald shows, it is often erroneous, and films and press reporting on it have been even less accurate. The Crimean War reports on Nightingale’s correspondence from the war hospitals and on the staggering amount of work she did post-war to ensure that the appalling death rate from disease (higher than that from bullets) did not recur. This volume contains much on Nightingale’s efforts to achieve real reforms. Her well-known, and relatively “sanitized”, evidence to the royal commission on the war is compared with her confidential, much franker, and very thorough Notes on the Health of the British Army, where the full horrors of disease and neglect are laid out, with the names of those responsible.

Drawing extensively from agency records, newspaper accounts, sociological studies and court documents, Hough explores the experiences of rural white unwed mothers in Maine and Tennessee.

Spirituality in Nursing: Standing on Holy Ground, Seventh Edition addresses the relationship between spirituality and nursing practice across a variety of settings related to caring for the ill and infirm.