Millennials usher us in: Nursing and the emerging virtual environment of care

Abstract

The nursing profession is a complex living system that must continually regenerate and redefine itself to remain viable and to meet emerging environmental challenges. As nursing care of patients moves iteratively from the home to the hospital and now into cyberspace, higher education is necessarily driven to cultivate student growth intrinsically, intellectually, and technologically to accommodate these new contexts of care. Reconceptualizing the nursing paradigm to include basic tenets of quantum physics, the science underlying virtual technology, will foster renewal of the nursing profession and its virtual component, and augment the already heightened consciousness of a new generation of students.