Informed Advocacy: An Emancipatory Nursing Perspective
The current ANS featured article is titled “Informed Advocacy: Rural, Remote, and Northern Nursing Praxis.” In this article, the authors, Karen MacKinnon, PhD, RN; Pertice Moffitt, PhD, RN present present a synthesis of their combined research about nursing practices in Western and Northern Canada. They compared the stories of rural Canadian public health nurses with feminist and critical theoretical
perspectives in order to discern evidence of informed advocacy as emancipatory nursing practice. In their conclusion they describe the elements of informed advocacy:
. . . we learned that the informed advocacy work of rural, remote, and northern nurses includes the following dimensions: (1) ensuring that people’s concerns are heard (by listening with intention and responding with action), (2) contextualizing practices (by making visible or using information about the contexts of people’s lives to inform health care decision making), (3) safeguarding (by ensuring that people remained safe), and (4) addressing systematic health inequities (by mobilizing local resources and by providing leadership at the health system or health policy level).
We welcome your ideas and responses! While this article is featured, it is available for free download, so visit the ANS web site now, read the article, and come back here to share your comments!
ANS: Advances in Nursing Science Blog 
Thank you so much for featuring our article. I will check the site and respond here to any questions you may have about our research. I live in Canada’s Northwest Territories and my research was conducted with First Nations women in a small remote community. Nurses are primary health care providers. There is no physician on site. Informed advocacy is essential at our remote sites and an important component of community work. When we have short stay nurses working in these communities, the work is disrupted. Community trust is an important aspect of this work. I look forward to reading and responding to your comments.
Pertice Moffitt
Thank you for drawing attention to the important work of nurses in rural, remote and northern communities, and for your apt description of their work of informed advocacy. It is what I call the moral work of nursing. I believe your framework could be applied to mental health, home and long term care nursing where nurses draw on their knowledge of their clients and living situations , advocate/plan for appropriate care, and when systemic gaps become apparent, seek other options or advocate for change. I am a retired nurse and author who has written about these matters in my new book, “The Moral Work of Nursing”. I will reflect further on how the informed advocacy framework applies to examples from my own practice and include them in my next writing project.
Hazel Magnussen
Parksville, BC
http://www.hazelmagnussen.com
Thank you so much for your message! Your work is so very important, and I am delighted that this article can contribute in this way!