Awarded first place in the 2013 AJN Book of the Year Awards in the Nursing Education/Continuing Education category

This is the first book to provide an in-depth exploration of strengths-based nursing care. It includes personal stories from practicing nurses and expert consultants using SBC, which enhances interest and credibility. It is filled with exercises and examples to help educators or nurses include SBC in their practice. As Dr. Benner states, the book is 'accessible and easy to read but requires much personal and professional reflection.'" Score: 98, 5 Stars.--Doody's Medical Reviews

[This book] is refreshing and timely. In 10 clearly written chapters, Dr. Gottlieb presents the theoretical foundations for strengths-based nursing care (SBNC), and provides practice-oriented examples and strategies for the integration of a human values-based approach that honors and supports transformative professional nursing."--Nursing Forum

I enthusiastically recommend this book for every introduction to nursing course, and equally for graduate nurses in Advanced Nursing Practice Master's programs and nurses currently engaged in practice. This book is one of those rare treats that put into words what expert nurses come to know and experience over time in their best practice. By giving clarity, insight and rigor to a central, but poorly understood value and wisdom embedded in the best of nursing practice, Dr. Laurie Gottlieb has given back to nursing a stronger, clearer self-understanding and social grasp of the best that nursing has to offer--Strengths Based Care can inform all diagnoses, health care design, and implementation.

From the Foreword by Patricia Benner, RN, PhD, FAAN
Professor Emeritus
University of California, San Francisco

"Laurie Gottlieb has her eye on the future of health care and what is now required for new directions, new paradigms, new thinking, to re-pattern our current outdated medical, illness- focused, problem-directed orientation, if not fixation. Strengths-based nursing is refreshingly liberating; it is focused on what is needed to sustain health and life itself. It is the necessary shift needed to redirect treatment and caring models from disease to health. It brings to the foreground strengths and positive options, and what is right, for our own daily living and health, versus what is wrong. This revolutionary work offers a breath of life into dominant medically oriented care models and liberates the human spirit of both nurses and those we serve. "

Jean Watson, PhD, RN,AHN-BC, FAAN
Distinguished Professor Emerita and Dean Emerita
University of Colorado Denver, College of Nursing
Founder/Director: Watson Caring Science Institute

This book is the highlight of the decade for me. I am comfortable in saying that this is one of the most important transformational books on nursing since Florence Nightingale's seminal book, Notes on Nursing...Dr. Laurie Gottlieb presents in great detail the tools, skills, and competencies that can empower all nurses to have an impact on their clients, patients, families, and communities. I hope that this book will become the Notes On Nursing of the 21st century. It has the power to transform nursing practice and with it, to transform the delivery of health care and the health care system. I also hope this book becomes the permanent companion of all nurses --for those who are on the journey to becoming nurses and for those who care for patients all over the world. This book will provide nurses with the inspiration and guidance to care for clients and patients in the most sensitive and respectful ways.

Judith Shamian, RN, PhD, LLD (Hon), DSc, (Hon), FAAN
President, International Council of Nurses (ICN)
CEO Emeritus, Victorian Order of Nurses (VON)
Past-President, Canadian Nurses Association (2010-2012)

Strengths-Based Nursing Care is a phenomenal book! Dr. Gottlieb has developed an approach to nursing that I believe holds a key in revolutionizing not only the discipline of nursing, but all of health care. She draws on the best traditions of nursing - the strengths of nursing itself that have endured for ages. As Dr. Gottlieb explains, nursing's deepest values have been derailed with the emergence of the "technocratic era." In this era, a deficit model prevails that emphasizes problems. Dr. Gottlieb proposes that we can and must turn our focus on strengths, and bring together four elements of strengths-based nursing: person-centered care, health promotion, collaborative partnerships and empowerment. I highly recommend this book for all nurses, and encourage all nursing faculty everywhere to embrace this book as a basic text.

Peggy L. Chinn, RN, PhD, FAAN
Professor Emerita
University of Connecticut

In the hallowed tradition of Florence Nightingale, who argued that nursing's mandate was 'to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him', Gottlieb has captured the best within the philosophical core of nursing theorizing and modernized it for today's nurse. In Strengths-Based Nursing, she deconstructs the fine details of everyday nursing thinking and action, guiding the development of a thoroughly moral, optimistic and practical clinical wisdom within the practitioner across the spectrum of health and illness. Capturing our attention with examples and exemplars, she takes us on an engaging and highly reflexive journey through how the health care world looks from a genuinely nursing angle of vision. In an era of renewed interest in authentic patient engagement, Gottlieb's text will be an outstanding toolkit with which to support and develop the profession.

Sally Thorne, RN, PHD, FAAN, FCAHS
Professor
University of British Columbia

Laurie Gottlieb is an exemplary scholar who has produced a unique volume, which blends the accumulated wisdom of several decades' immersion in nursing with expert clinical testimony into a new synthesis known as the strengths based model of nursing. The book will appeal to students and seasoned clinicians keen to expand and deepen their knowledge in their quest to unravel the enigma of expertise.

Anne Marie Rafferty, CBE, BSc, MPhil, DPhil (Oxon), RGN, DN, FRCN, FKC, FAAN
Professor
King's College London

Strengths-Based Care is an important and timely contribution to relational nursing education and practice. I would highly recommend this book to nursing students and practising nurses at various levels within the education and healthcare systems." --Canadian Journal of Nursing Leadership

Highly recommended." --Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

This is the first book that sets out the foundations of Strengths-Based Nursing Care (SBC) as an approach to practice to promote health and facilitate healing for persons and families. It is also the first practical guide for nurses on how to incorporate the knowledge, skills, and tools of SBC into everyday practice. The text builds on and further develops concepts in a model developed by the prestigious McGill University Nursing Program. SBC signifies a paradigm shift in nursing care from a model based on problems, deficits, and pathology to an approach to care that focuses on individual, family, and community strengths as a cornerstone of effective nursing care. The testimony of 46 nurses demonstrates how SBC can be effectively used in multiple settings across the lifespan.

The book develops the theoretical foundations underlying SBC, promotes the acquisition of fundamental skills needed for SBC practice, and offers specific strategies, techniques, and tools for identifying strengths and harnessing them to facilitate healing and health. According to the SBC model, the text describes how one becomes a nurse through retraining the senses, developing observation skills, and reforming interpersonal and communication skills for clinical judgment and decision-making. The text includes an instructor's guide. Author Laurie Gottlieb has been the recipient of the prestigious Centennial Award of the Canadian Nurses Association, the only award to recognize the 100 most influential nurses in Canada.

Key Features:

• Provides the first complete, foundational, and practical textbook on Strength-Based Nursing Care
• Teaches how to identify, engage, and nurture existing and new strengths to enhance health and healing
• Integrates testimony and clinical insights from 46 nurses using SBC in clinical practice
• Emphasizes clinical and critical inquiry, clinical grasp and judgment, decision-making, and evidence-based practice