56 BooK rEVIEW
Strengths-Based Nursing Care
By dr. Laurie Gottlieb
352 pages (paperback)
springer publishing Company
isBN: 978-0826195869
price: $70.50
Reviewed by Karen leGrow, RN, phd
Assistant professor
daphne Cockwell school of Nursing
Ryerson University
toronto, oN
When I was asked to review this book, the
idea of a “strengths-based” approach to
care was not new to me; I had become
aware of this approach through the
earlier work of Dr. Gottlieb and her
colleagues (Feeley and Gottleib 2000;
Gottlieb and Rowat 1987; Pless et al.
1994) while I was working as a clinical
nurse specialist at Holland Bloorview
Children’s Rehabilitation Centre
during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
I had implemented a professional
development program for ambulatory care
nurses at Bloorview using the McGill Model of Nursing, in conjunction
with the Calgary Family Assessment and Intervention models (Wright and Leahy
2009), as the foundation for nursing practice. Given these experiences, I was
excited to review Dr. Gottlieb’s latest ideas regarding strengths-based care (SBC).
I was also very interested to see how the idea of a strengths-based approach had
evolved into a formal framework to guide nursing care.
Strengths-Based Nursing Care is divided into three major sections that reflect the
theoretical foundations for SBC, the basic skills required to practise this approach
and clinical examples from advanced practice nurses who have used SBC with
to review this book, the
development program for ambulatory care
