Reviewer: Rachel S Simmons, PhD, DNP, WHNP, ANP, PMHNP, IBCLC (WellMed at Dr. Phillips Outpatient Psychiatry Group)
Description: Healthcare clinicians, educators, and students are tasked with staying abreast of evolving societal changes to create tolerant environments and multimodal systems that function to serve not only the privileged, but the underserved and vulnerable members of society. Vulnerable communities are challenged to achieve optimal physical and psychological health because of chronic disparities that exist due to institutional and systemic racism, discrimination, and marginalization. This book represents a dynamic and integrative approach for stakeholders in health to consider the vast and nuanced cultural concepts required to navigate various sectors of health services and to provide care consistent with the values and needs of the underserved while recognizing persistent and unjust disparities as causative factors. The title of the book captures the internal works and grounds the readers toward groundbreaking and innovative concepts that can be immediately translated into institutions that are tasked with caring for diverse populations. Each chapter is written by an expert author and covers taboo concepts ranging from cultural humility, health inequities, social justice, and physical and mental well-being. The book unites various disciplines through linking health and wellness to social justice, and provides solutions for stakeholders to become culturally humble through self-reflection and critique and to refine or develop empathy for the most vulnerable. The chapters are written succinctly with pertinent concepts bolded and include various models, charts, and images to reinforce, organize, and convey pertinent data. The book's content provides a novice or expert health stakeholder with up-to-date and evolving information for integrative interventions for vulnerable populations. This is the first published edition.
Purpose: The book is written to provide core concepts of the racial, cultural, and health issues impeding the health and well-being of vulnerable populations. The author prefaces the book by acknowledging timely and seminal events of the 21st century such as the pandemic and escalating racial injustices around the globe. These events have exposed wide-ranging disparities that cannot be fixed with standard health knowledge. This book is uniquely necessary as it thoroughly addresses health through a multimodal lens not often considered by educators, practitioners, clinicians, researchers, and students. The book meets the stated objective of providing an integrative framework that stakeholders in healthcare can utilize to inform best practices to improve the health of the most vulnerable. This book challenges the readers to move beyond cultural competence by defining various racial and culture-derived concepts with context and relative meaning to those impacted by health-based decision making.
Audience: The audience for this book includes a diverse group of individuals such as educators, practitioners, clinicians, researchers, and students. These individuals often have significant contact with vulnerable populations and must be up-to-date and open-minded to effect positive change and outcomes. Educators, practitioners, clinicians, researchers, and students are all guided by ethical oaths that require intellectual curiosity and a growth mindset to procure best practices and social justice through advocacy for all groups, especially the vulnerable. This book provides a strong foundation to achieve the author's objective of a framework for integrative health. The book meets or exceeds the needs of the intended audience as the information is presented in a scholarly, evidence-based, and solution-centered manner with vast opportunities for internalization of the provided information. The author is a researcher and affiliated with an academic institution dedicated to teaching, research, and service, and is well qualified to address the chasm in integrative health nursing interventions for vulnerable populations. Each chapter contributor is affiliated with a major health system or university with the knowledge, credibility, and expertise to inform the readers.
Features: The book covers a variety of integrative information that links health and well-being to culture and social justice. Key terms, often identified in independent literature, are compiled with context and application strategies. The book is clearly written to capture the interest of the novice or an advanced learner. Highlights include the variability of grounding terms as a foundation for providing care to the vulnerable. The book is inclusive of many subcultures and groups such as transgender people, racially diverse groups, pregnant women, students taking high-stakes tests, and rural populations that have been hollowed and disinvested. The best aspects of the book include the scholarship captured by various authors using evidence-based, current research, and practical solutions to complex problems that plague the most vulnerable in society. There is a dearth of scholarly inquiry that implores health clinicians to consider the effects of the social determinants of health on outcomes. Unique features include succinct but thoroughly written chapters that allow the author to include expanded and heterogenous perspectives. Many chapters include an inspirational quote by a famous trailblazer who philosophically underpinned and grounded the author. In addition, chapters are replete with concept models and toolkits to augment the core themes, key points, and concepts. References are included at the end of each chapter for cross-referencing, further research, or clarification of a topic. More chapter visuals are needed to assist with personalizing the disparaged groups to the readers while accounting for visual learners.
Assessment: This book is useful for educators, practitioners, clinicians, researchers, and students in various disciplines. Professionals across various disciplines could benefit from strategies and interventions surrounding cultural humility, social justice, mindfulness and stress reduction, self-care, nutrition strategies, wellness, and mental health approaches. Books such as Community and Public Health Nursing, 10th edition, Rector and Stanley (Wolters Kluwer, 2022) contain key concepts that are comparable to those in this book. However, this book expands on key terms and concepts that could shift the trajectory of integrative approaches to health if internalized and contextualized by the reader. Updated editions with different authors will add to evolving integrative healthcare literature.
