I believe in nursing and what it does for the mindbodyheartspirit of each person touched by a nurse, be it life saving or spirit saving.
I believe in nursing’s role and social contract with society.
I believe that nursing’s future will be more about our contribution of caring consciousness in healthcare.
I believe that it will be nursing that will bring healthcare through its current turmoil.
But first, we must pay attention to ourselves and learn how to reduce the barriers that exist to our caring consciousness development and use.
You, as nurses, want to be able to provide authentic care more often and with more ease. But the healthcare work environment often blocks your ability to care authentically.
I have witnessed nurses struggle to be their best nurse selves in our stressful work settings for decades.
You have difficult jobs. Healthcare is the most complex industry in existence. Its unique demands of high science, high technology, high risks and high touch all create high stress for you. You are the ones responsible for responding to the deep human need for high touch in the midst of crises. You bring calm within the healthcare storm.
It is your high touch and your caring that is the center piece of healthcare.
- Patients need and want your high touch
- Healthcare depends on it
- You require it to sustain meaning in your work and career
Authentic Caring is the KEY and must be unlocked.
But here’s the TRIFECTA of Authentic Caring:
- It is authentic caring that brings you meaning and touches patients.
- It is authentic caring that is often blocked by the barriers created by science and technology in your work.
- It is authentic caring that requires nurturing of your personal nursing knowing. And this is the component of nursing knowledge that is the least understood, most problematic to master or teach, and has the least amount of resources applied to it in education and in organizations.
This is big. This requires nursing to equip nurses to break through the barriers created by the healthcare system, and to lead healthcare to authentic caring.