Justice-oriented critical care in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) requires nurses and the ICU team to recognize that suffering, vulnerability, and healing unfold within moral, social, and structural conditions. The PICU is one of the most ethically charged sites in healthcare, where children confront life-threatening illness, and families confront fear, uncertainty, and power imbalances. This paper uses philosophical perspectives from distributive justice, relational ethics, phenomenology, and critical theory to analyze how justice can be strengthened in PICU practice. It identifies the main barriers that prevent equitable care, outlines the needs that must be addressed, and highlights opportunities to create a morally robust and socially accountable approach. Justice in the PICU cannot be reduced to fair allocation of resources or equal treatment. It must consider how children and families experience moral recognition, voice, respect, and compassion within a high acuity environment. This paper argues that the future of critical care nursing requires moving beyond rule-based frameworks toward an embodied and relational understanding of justice that honors the lived realities of patients, families, nurses, and the healthcare team.

The nursing academy in Canada, motivated by the release of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action in 2015, has declared support for and commitment to Indigenization. This study, framed by the historical context of colonialism in Canadian healthcare and nursing education, aimed to understand the current state of Indigenization within undergraduate nursing programs in Saskatchewan. I explored three areas of inquiry: how strategic plans define Indigenization, staff experiences and practices in implementing it, and how these discourses and practices perpetuate or transform existing power structures. With Spivak's theory of the deconstruction of marginality as the overarching theoretical framework, I examined the strategic plans of three major post-secondary institutions and their respective undergraduate nursing programs using Fairclough's dialectical-relational approach to critical discourse analysis. I also interviewed a total of seven nursing staff members from the three programs to gain an understanding of their practices of Indigenization. The study identified four key constructs of Indigenization within the discourse of the province of Saskatchewan's nursing education strategic plans: Indigenous inclusion, relationship, reconciliation, and decolonization. A critical finding is that presenting these four constructs as interchangeable diminishes their unique, albeit interconnected roles in achieving Indigenization goals. The research further shows how nursing programs are centering marginalized Indigenous Knowledges and systems but also reveals that racism remains a barrier to Indigenization. The study emphasizes the importance of explicitly defining Indigenization and its goals to deconstruct power dynamics and practices within nursing programs, and to continuously examine racism as a persistent issue in nursing education. The study encourages the nursing academy to adopt a decolonial lens in its everyday Indigenization efforts, which will bring about transformation of the academy.

The rapid expansion of digital health technologies-including telemedicine, wearable devices, and AI-driven diagnostics-has transformed healthcare practices by mediating how care is delivered, perceived, and experienced. While ethical debates in digital health often focus on data governance, privacy, and equitable access, less attention has been paid to digitally mediated healthcare as an embodied practice, particularly in nursing contexts. This article develops a nursing-phenomenological framework for digital health ethics by focusing on how digital technologies mediate patients' embodied experiences of illness and care. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, the analysis examines how digitally mediated care reshapes bodily schema, perception, and presence in clinical encounters. Integrating Don Ihde's postphenomenology, the article further shows how technologies actively mediate perception, co-constitute embodiment, and generate multiple stabilities that shape clinical interpretation, patient engagement, and nursing practice. The central claim is that digital health ethics must attend not only to abstract bioethical principles but also to the embodied and technologically mediated conditions under which care is experienced and enacted. By clarifying the experiential and technological dimensions of digitally mediated healthcare, this approach offers a situated ethical lens with practical implications for nursing practice, technological design, and health policy.

The objective of this study was to examine the impacts of obstetric violence (OV) on maternity healthcare professionals (MHPs) in Israel and the coping strategies they employ. This qualitative study was conducted in various maternity care settings across Israel. Data were collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 21 MHPs, who had witnessed or had been involved in incidents of OV. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed thematically to identify key patterns related to the emotional and professional effects of OV, and to the coping strategies used by the participants. The analysis revealed two primary themes. The first relates to the consequences of exposure to OV on MHPs, including the impact on professional identity and functioning, emotional and psychological distress, and ambivalent responses to colleagues involved in such incidents. The second theme addresses MHPs' coping strategies such as disclosing incidents despite anticipated repercussions and feelings of isolation alongside coping through personal initiatives (raising awareness and promoting action regarding OV within and beyond the workplace). Findings highlight the imperative for a dual strategy: eradication of OV and providing meaningful support to all affected individuals, both the women subjected to OV and the MPHs exposed to or involved in such events.

This critical discussion paper examines how the International Council of Nurses' (ICN) 2025 definition of "nurse" may shape nursing work by functioning as a discursive artifact and proposes the mid-range concept of discursive burdening to help explain the potential downstream effects on nurses' labor. Grounded in Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the social ecology of nursing, this study analyzes the ICN definition alongside its explanatory report and selectively mapped it to scholarly, policy, and gray sources to illustrate how professional definitions can travel into practice. Using CDA tools, linguistic features of the text were linked to discourse and wider social practices. From the CDA of the ICN definition, the concept of discursive burdening emerges with three interrelated dimensions: (1) deontological dumping, (2) amorphous scope expansion, and (3) intensifying emancipatory labor. Mapped onto nursing's social ecology, these dynamics plausibly cascade through overlapping regulatory, bureaucratic, occupational, gender, and multi-professional systems. The ICN report also names buffers that can diffuse these effects when made co-present with the public definition, which includes legal conditionality, regulator mediation, contextualization, resource support, clarifying and sharing roles, and education/leadership investment.

The literature largely agrees in recognizing care as a central and defining aspect of nursing. However, this concept takes on diverse nuances, as evidenced by the variety of nursing theories. We align with the perspective of Chris Gastmans and others who conceptualize the ontology of nursing from a relational standpoint: at the core of nursing practice lies the personal nurse-patient relationship-the caring relationship. This relationship possesses an intrinsic moral dimension, stemming from the integration of scientific knowledge and sound ethical judgment, all directed toward the provision of good care-the intrinsic teleological dimension of nursing. In a virtue ethics framework, questions concerning the character of the ethical agent take precedence over those regarding correct actions, principles, or consequences. The primary concern is to identify the qualities a person must cultivate to be ethically good, given that the moral value of actions is largely shaped by the character of the agent performing them. This approach supports reflection from a praxis-oriented perspective. The aim of this paper is to explore the role that virtues and phronesis-as developed within a Neo-Aristotelian perspective-play in fulfilling the telos of nursing practice, and consequently, in the flourishing of the professional. Trial Registration: Not applicable.

The NLN/Jeffries Simulation Theory (JST) occupies an important and debated position in nursing education. It is widely used for its practical value but often criticized for lacking theoretical clarity. Traditional evaluation methods rely on single theoretical perspectives and have not resolved this contradiction, leading to fragmented and incomplete assessments. This study presents a Human-AI collaborative framework for comprehensive meta-theoretical analysis and uses JST as a demonstration case. The framework is based on the concept of crystallization and combines evaluation criteria from Fawcett, Meleis, and Walker and Avant. Artificial intelligence is used to organize and systematically analyze complex and multidimensional theoretical evidence, while the human researcher performs interpretation and synthesis. The findings show that JST's lack of precision is not a weakness but a strength that allows it to function as a boundary object. It serves as a flexible structure that supports collaboration across nursing education, research, and practice. This study provides a practical and transparent model for using Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in academic research. It shows how technological tools can augment rather than displace the critical, interpretive judgment of nursing scholars.

This study explores how internet memes serve as digital communication tools in public health discourse, influencing public perceptions by spreading both accurate and misleading health information. Utilizing a dual qualitative approach, Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) and Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA), this study examined 99 vaccine-related memes shared online during the 2019 and 2025 measles outbreaks and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. QCA analyzed rhetorical tones (pathos, ethos, and logos) and vaccine stances (pro, anti, and neutral), while RTA identified key themes. Memes were sampled from Google Images using broad vaccine-related search terms (e.g., "vaccine meme," "vaccination meme"), allowing inclusion of memes related to a wide range of vaccine-preventable diseases rather than limiting the dataset to any single condition. While memes predominantly targeted emotional appeals (pathos), emergent themes include increased use of logical appeals (logos), political polarization, and anti-vaccine sentiments. Nurses and other public health communicators must counter misinformation and foster evidence-based dialogue to shape digital health literacy. Rhetorical patterns (e.g., humor, emotional resonance, and appeals to credibility) are communication strategies that transcend national boundaries. These findings, therefore, provide a foundation for understanding how similar dynamics might appear in other linguistic and cultural settings, while highlighting the need for ongoing research.

Male infertility contributes to nearly half of the global infertility, yet nursing scholarship continues to marginalize men's experiences, reflecting entrenched assumptions that equate reproduction with femininity. This article reframes male infertility as a relational, socially embedded phenomenon and a site of disciplinary transformation. Drawing on intersectionality, masculinity theory, performativity, and stigma, this article shows how race, class, sexuality, disability, and cultural context intersect to produce compounded stigma, invisibility, and restricted access to care. For example, queer and trans men remain largely invisible in heteronormative reproductive discourse, while men from low-resource settings face systemic barriers to psychosocial support. To address these silences, this paper proposes an intersectional nursing proposition grounded in reflexivity, cultural humility, couple-centeredness, and structural awareness. Visual scaffolding (one table and two figures) clarifies the pathway from entrenched binaries to intersectional praxis. The manuscript presents male infertility as both a clinical and theoretical challenge, urging nursing to reconceptualize care, vulnerability, and reproductive justice to serve diverse masculinities and reduce structural inequities.