Take Back Your Caring

This is what taking back caring looks like for nurses.

Let’s start at the core:

• Patients need you
• Healthcare needs you
• Society needs you

The problem is that the healthcare practice environments distract you, and human beings only have so much bandwidth, capacity to think, do and feel. Yes, even for nurses.

The other problem is that nursing leadership in organizations are dumbing down nursing’s call to caring.

There are a lot of reasons for this:

• Succumbing to the competing demands
• Being overwhelmed
• Not thinking
• Survival

I’ve been a nursing administrator for three decades.

Being a leader in the healthcare system does dull one’s sensibilities.

Blinders are too often required to get through the day.

But this is the deal …

Our toxic healthcare environments must change.

Our nursing leaders must change course.

Society is challenging the healthcare system to integrate mindbodyheartspirit into its care. Evidence of mindbodyheartspirit consciousness is everywhere. Consumers’ expectations are rising, as they should.

And nursing leadership is responding with formulaic caring programs. All for quick, consistent, “reliable” patient satisfaction scores.

And we’re missing a golden opportunity!

This is NOT impossible.

This is a HUGE challenge and a SIMPLE one, really simple.

It’s already within us.  It just needs to be tapped on a collective level.

It lives in every nurse.

We know this.

Nurse leaders know this.

The battle cry for formulaic caring is so deafening that it paralyzes the individual nurse’s caring consciousness, in an already overtaxed world of high priorities. This is creating a palpable confusion and tension within nurses, the source of which can be unclear to them, the leaders and the healthcare industry. It is an elephant in the room.

This suppression of caring consciousness within nurses is beyond shared governance and Magnet programs. These give voice to other important functions for nursing and healthcare.

This is about openly acknowledging and growing the channels of caring consciousness within each nurse that would empower an untapped life source that already exists. This unleashing could carry nursing to new levels in an age that is ready and longing for it.

This is what brought nurses to nursing. It will sustain nurses’  careers in nursing. It will enrich the patient experience. And it will heal healthcare.