Abstract

Health-care professionals have a long history of attending to concepts and theory related to health geography, often in more recent years explicitly drawing on theory in health geography. This chapter will focus on the history of nursing’s contributions to and applications of health geography, which have uncovered the importance of place and space to the delivery and receipt of health-care services. We specifically focus on nursing because of nurses’ unique perspectives and our own experience of using health geography in our scholarship. Nurses’ insights are often the product of their lengthy observations of and experiences in various settings expressly as practitioners, along with their empirical studies of their patients and fellow colleagues. This work has added to the understanding of how communities, homes and hospitals, as complex social and cultural phenomena, are experienced by those who live, receive care and work in them.