Preface

摘要

An awareness of the importance of environmental influences on health has been apparent in nursing since the days of Florence Nightingale. Her broad view brought into focus the importance of clean air, clean water, access to sunshine, and hygiene. Although these seem obvious now, they were often overlooked in her day. Similarly, while it may seem obvious today that we are barraged with environmental challenges, it is not at the top of our priorities as a profession. Environmental issues impact health, including exposures to toxic chemicals, chronic exposures to air and water pollution, or the many health threats unleashed by climate change. From a planetary perspective, our health can be impacted by the disruption and imbalance of our homeostatic natural world. This may be felt locally during flooding, for instance, or in large complex systems such as climate stability. Impacts of the environment on health, from local to global, are complex, multilayered, and difficult to predict and measure. However, we learn more each year about how human health is impacted. In 1995, nurse leaders wrote a report "Nursing, Health, and the Environment" from the Institute of Medicine (Mood, Snyder, & Pope, 1995). In this report, the authors set the scope of environmental health nursing to include Research, Education, Advocacy and Practice. Since, it has been called the REAP Framework, and its relevance continues today.