• DOI:10.1023/A:1020867916902
• Corpus ID: 189864015

Common Ground

@article{Stalnaker2002CommonG,
  title={Common Ground},
  author={Robert Stalnaker},
  journal={Linguistics and Philosophy},
  year={2002},
  volume={25},
  pages={701-721}
}

• Robert Stalnaker
• Published 2002
• Medicine
• Linguistics and Philosophy

Palliative nursing is becoming increasingly diverse as the benefits of our work are extending across patient populations and settings of care. The pioneering work of hospice nurses in home care settings has expanded to now embrace almost every setting of care and patient population. The integration of palliative care across settings and diseases is an abundantly good thing; yet, one challenge posed is that we, as palliative care nurses, are often unaware of the important work done by our colleagues in settings that are not related to our daily work. Nurses working in long-term caremay not be aware of the resources developed by pediatric nurses on children’s grief, yet these resources could be valuable in supporting the grandchildren of their residents. Nurses in home-based hospices often have valuable clinical symptomassessment tools and family education about approaching death that could be applied to palliative care nurses in ICUs. The Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing (JHPN) is at the crossroads of these diverse settings of care. As the official journal of the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association, our readers and our authors represent each of the settings where expert, innovative care is being provided, yet often not widely shared. JHPN can serve as the common ground, the place where palliative care in geriatrics, pediatrics, emergency departments, longterm care, neonatal ICU, and many other clinical settings join in conversation. In this dialogue, we discover that our common ground is seeking improved care for patients and families. This issue of JHPN is a clear example of the vast domain of palliative nursing. The article by Carol Long and colleagues presents a quality improvement project conducted in longterm care that can serve as a model for many other settings. The article by Salmon and Zoucha is an eloquent description of vital issues in providing care to Muslim patients and can be applied across settings and can also spark our need to understand other diverse faiths and cultures. The article by Spichiger from Switzerland addresses patient and family relationships with nurses in Switzerland hospitals, yet is very consistent with the article by Virani and colleagues, identifying challenges in communication by nurses in US palliative care. These excellent clinical articles are complemented in these crossroads by a challenge to educators in the article by Whitehead et al and to researchers in the article by Schneider and colleagues regarding the need for adequate research samples and longitudinal research to capture the experiences of our patients and advance our care. Many years ago, I first met Florence Wald, the nurse who began the first hospice in America. She was an educator, a dean of a school of nursing, and a visionary who traveled to the United Kingdom; witnessed hospice care; and returned to the United States to begin hospice. What I remember most about Florence was the sparkle in her eye and her intense curiosity and belief that the more we learn from each other, the greater our reach will be. I am also very excited to announce wonderful news about the journal. In January 2010, JHPN received notification that the journal has been selected for coverage in the Thomson Reuters indexing and abstracts. This means that JHPNwill be indexed and abstracted in Science Citation Index Expanded (also known as SciSearch), Current