Space, place, and the evidence base: part I - An introduction to health geography

As the prelude to a more substantive discussion forthcoming in Worldviews on Evidence-Based Nursing, this article introduces the sub-discipline of health geography to readers. It outlines how convincing arguments that health and health care are impacted heavily by space and place have given health geography increasing profile and legitimacy as well as relevancy as a source of evidence for practice. Building on this introduction, our later article will discuss how beyond the metaparadigm of environment in nursing research, geographical research might fully operationalize space and place, and a range of practice issues that this might usefully inform. The current article outlines key geographical concepts and approaches and introduces a range of geographical perspectives from quantitative research on the distributive features of disease and health care, to qualitative research focused on the dynamic relationship between health and place. The topic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is then introduced to indicate how some of these ideas might be applied to an important issue that impacts upon nurses and their work.