Westberg Institute Community
The heart of the faith community nursing movement, Acting locally, inspiring globally.
A question about Perspectives
I recently received the following question and thought I would respond for the entire group:
“Why must FCN's join the SCA to view Perspectives? I realize that Perspectives is now housed at SCA but it is a publication for FCN's.”
Perspectives was a subscription-based publication for many years when Westberg was with the Church Health Center. It was NOT a free publication for FCNs then as it was available only to subscribers.
Publications are not cheap to create and publish. Because of limited subscribers and the high cost of publication, in order to avoid complete termination of Perspectives, Church Health transferred ownership of the publication to the SCA Nursing Division about a year before the eventual move of the Westberg Institute to SCA.
SCA chose to absorb the cost of publication in support of faith community nursing and made Perspectives a free membership benefit for nursing division members with broader spiritual care focus for the benefit of all nurses. They also agreed to make issues available for sale in print or electronic form for non-members.
It is not unusual for nursing journals to either charge a subscription price or include their publication as a member benefit using a portion of membership fees to cover costs. Faith community nursing is no exception. If anyone is aware of a funder or a grant that would underwrite the cost of production and publication, then SCA would gladly make Perspectives available to non-members as well.
This was an excellent question. Thank you for asking!
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