Gazing through the crystal ball: potential futures for nursing research?

In this column Thomas Cox explores advances in travel and technology that he believes will help to change the face of healthcare and thus nursing practice and research. Within a focus on the coming globalization of healthcare, he proposes a restructuring of nursing into four tiers of practitioners, each with a different focus in providing care, and reframes the meaning of this care, offering a glimpse into the ways nursing research might evolve to parallel changes in practice. He then delineates in some detail the ways the process of conducting research is likely to change given expected advances in computerization. Francelyn Reeder focuses on the pattern changes taking place globally and the philosophical ideas that can assist nurse researchers in recognizing a very broad array of sources of evidence that will help further the discipline and enhance quality of life for all beings and the environment. Integral to her presentation are the ideas that belonging comes before being in the world and that integral evidence is necessary to understand the unfolding life world of all the world's inhabitants.