Telling our stories: writing for publication to enhance reflective and contextualised family and community practice.

Abstract

Health care provision is an area in which constant innovation and improvement is needed, with nurses and others involved in service planning and delivery being called upon to do more with less, and to meet the needs of individuals and communities facing ever more complex health challenges and disease processes (Jackson & Saltman, 2011). In addition, health care is delivered within a culture of increasing performativity, accountability and demand for evidence (Jackson, 2009; Taylor, Lyon, & Harris, 2005). These two factors create a need for innovation in service design and delivery as well as for focused and considered dissemination of such innovations and how they are applied, through stories of practice - reflective and contextualised accounts of what has worked well, what has not worked so well, where improvements have been made and where further improvements are necessary.Necessity is the mother of invention, and right from Nightingale's time (Stanley, 2007), nurses have shown themselves to be inventive and able to adapt to various settings and situations in order to provide the best possible care in all manner of circumstances (Biedermann, Usher, Williams, & Hayes, 2001; Hegney, McCarthy, Rogers-Clark, & Gorman, 2002; O'Brien & Jackson, 2007; Rewi, 2007). But, when working with families and communities there are various persuasive cultural and social imperatives that will exert a strong, even decisive influence on openness and adherence to education, intervention and treatment (Mohan, Wilkes, & Jackson, 2006; Ogunsiji, Wilkes, & Jackson, 2007; Wade, Jackson, & Daly, 2003). The strength of these factors may be such that they cannot be ignored and quite possibly accounts, at least in part, for the poorer health status of some minority community groups.In establishing trusting and respectful relationships with patients, clients and families, there is much that can be learned. In this issue we are pleased to present a range of papers that portray perspectives from consumers, and cover diverse issues such as the meaning of childbirth for African women in Canada (Etowa, 2012), experiential accounts of Muslim people with diabetes, and how they manage this in the context of Ramadan (Peterson, Nayda, & Hill, 2012), the meaning of smoking from the perspective of older women (Treloar & Gunn, 2012), and older New Zealand women's perspectives of factors that impact on their quality of life while living with chronic illness (Lowe & McBride-Henry, 2012). These papers all contribute insights that can inform practice and services so as to make them more appropriate and sensitive to a wider range of health consumers.However, there are many innovative approaches to practice and service delivery that are potentially very useful to others, but that are never adequately disseminated (Cleary, Walter, & Luscombe, 2007). This means that other nurses, patients, clients and communities may not ever benefit from the knowledge that has been generated. There is a disconnect between doing and writing and it may be that we are more comfortable with talking than writing, as some information about innovations in practice development and novel approaches to care can only be found in the form of conference abstracts, which, while of some use, tend to lack the contextual and other detail necessary to make full and informed decisions about their efficacy, benefits and potential for further development or application.It is known that there are all sorts of reasons why writing is an activity that can cause avoidance and procrastination in many people (Jackson, 2009). Even where there is a high level of commitment and desire to write, in today's highly pressured organisational environments, it can still be very difficult to find the time to write. So how can we approach writing to facilitate targeted and focused, rather than informal and unplanned, dissemination?Given that there are a limited number of hours in a day, and ever-increasing demand, simple and realistic goal setting is essential. …