What Are We Doing Here? What is Saving Nurses About?

This week has been a time of focus for me.

I’m organizing content for courses that I will be offering over the coming months. So I thought I would summarize some of my crystallizations today.

Who am I?

I am a Nurse Leader Activist campaigning for ways to help nurses find their Authentic Caring Selves in today’s healthcare system.

I have been a nursing leader for years, feeling trapped in the healthcare system and searching for my nurse leader voice and platform locally and nationally …

to help myself and other nurses and nurse leaders

find practical solutions

that can be widely applied

that generate authentic caring

and nurse inner health

amidst our escalating work demands.

Why Now?

I see 3 opportunities at a most unusual time. That Time is NOW!

1. Patient satisfaction scores are a gift and reflect the value placed on nurses’ caring knowledge and skills by patients and society.
2. Wellness consciousness has entered healthcare. The societal shift from all things rational and technological to mind body wellness signifies a need for change in healthcare. These forces are moving healthcare in the direction of nursing’s domain.
3. Nurses are fighting for their souls in response to the current battle cry for formulaic caring, in the race for higher patient satisfaction. We nursing leaders have a moral, professional and personal obligation to provide a beacon for nurses and frontline nurse leaders who have lost sight of nursing’s core, but whom I believe still yearn to give more authentic caring. There exists an untapped resource of authentic caring within all nurses, but we must be vigilant in our actions.

What Am I Offering?

1.Self-knowing practices –

I believe that as each individual nurse learns to value their personal nurse selves, their caring consciousness grows and more authentic caring happens. In the course of a lifetime of caring, a nurse is a resource to hundreds of patients, and as such should treat themselves with the same respect and care given to a patient.

This is beyond our current image of self-care practices, I am speaking of a purposeful, life-long practice of self-knowing, involving self-awareness, self-care and self-growth.

2. Advocacy for Nurse Leaders to Step Up and Lead Caring in Healthcare- 

I believe that the healthcare system and leaders, to include nursing leaders, locally and nationally, are standing in the way of authentic connections between patients and nurses. As a nursing leader in the healthcare system for years, I can say this with shame, courage and clarity.

Nurse leaders, locally and nationally, can leverage the power of patient satisfaction scores and the expanding caring consciousness within our culture as a platform to step up and give voice to authentic caring and its benefits for all.

Expanding and promoting nursing’s unique skills of authentic caring within the healthcare system and in communities would benefit nurses, patients, healthcare and society.

In addition, authentic caring brings more meaning and satisfaction to nurses’ practice, preventing compassion fatigue, burnout, moral despair and attrition, which is a double win for all of us.

Tressolini, C.P. and Pew-Fetzer Task Force. Health Professionals Education and Relationship-Centered Care. 1994. San Francisco: Pew Health Commission. http://rccswmi.org Accessed March, 2016.