When I introduce undergraduate students to holistic nursing, I begin with a question rather than a definition: who is missing from the room when health decisions are made? The answers, drawn from their early clinical experiences, almost always include the same groups - young mothers, newcomers, people without housing, people who do not share the language of the unit.
Holistic practice asks us to see those absences and respond. It asks us to design care plans that account for the social, economic, cultural, and political conditions of the people we serve. In a low-resource setting, that means addressing transportation, literacy, family structure, and trust. In a Canadian classroom, it means preparing students for the same realities at home.
The pedagogy I have come to favor is patient and reflective. Students need time to sit with the discomfort of inequity before they can act on it. They need to encounter perspectives that are not their own and to learn from communities, not only about them. Only then does evidence-based practice become equity-informed practice.