Eco-wellness nursing: getting serious about innovation and change

Eco-wellness nursing represents a creative, challenging and empowering approach for facilitating a sustainable future for people and their environments, focusing beyond positivistic explanations and solutions, towards a more emancipating eco-centric praxis. Underlying this approach are the principles of 'wellness', 'holism', and a 'reflexive and sustainable eco-culture'. The goal is helping people understand how to sustain their wellness, including their environments. Negotiating or brokering change from a traditional nursing model will require a revision of focus in roles, attitudes, contexts and actions of nurses. Crucial in this transformation is greater nursing independence in the private marketplace, which may involve consultancies, collaborative ventures, utilization of new technologies such as multimedia communications, and targeted nursing oriented research and development.