Post-hospital nursing: shortage, shifts, and scripts

This article offers a critique of nursing's focus during this critical turn in post-hospital nursing with evolving, nonmedical, nonclinical notions of human health. It raises some seminal questions about nursing's ground-of-being in relation to its survival for a new and different human health script. The call is not for more--old script nursing and nurses, but less and different--transformed nursing and nurses, grounded in mature disciplinary, philosophical values, knowledge, and skills that converge with evolving public and system realities: real, surreal, virtual, and timeless. The fewer, different, transformed nurses will need to be grounded in nursing, while simultaneously transdisciplinary and, paradoxically, beyond nursing.