International Health Humanities Network Membership

Associate Professor in the Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary, Canada

I worked mostly in mental health in my clinical career. Originally from the UK, I worked at a therapeutic community, the Cassel Hospital, where I learned the power of language in caring for patients and the importance of their story for current problems in living and sources of resilience. I worked mostly in older adult mental health after moving to Canada in 1995. I completed my PhD thesis about ideas from Buddhist thought applied to acute care mental health nursing in 2012 and joined the Faculty of Nursing the same year. I am interested in meeting points between nursing and philosophy, particularly the hermeneutic tradition, and how nursing has its own disciplinary history within the wider field of health humanities. 

I am the author of the book Nursing and Humanities, Routledge, 2020. https://www.routledge.com/Nursing-and-Humanities/McCaffrey/p/book/9780367347765