Hi, and welcome to my blog! I'm Susan E. Mazer -- a knowledge expert and thought leader on how the environment of care impacts the patient experience. Topics I write about include safety, satisfaction, hospital noise, nursing, care at the bedside, and much more.
May 6, 2016
“A nurse is anyone who is entrusted with the health of another.”
Florence Nightingale wrote this at a time when the act of nursing was done by domestic labor, religious women, or family members. Not yet a profession, nursing was a role, a set of tasks.
It was Nightingale’s mission to elevate not only the role of nursing, but to define it by the skills and practices equal to its value to the ill.
While we seldom, if ever, refer to Nightingale’s clean and succinct definition, anyone who has been in a hospital or emergency room, or observed a hospice nurse knows what her statement means.
In our very stratified healthcare system, physicians are so often separated from patients in so many ways. They read test reports, prescribe medications, diagnose, examine.
All of this is the border around a human experience of illness that winds up controlling the life of the patient. However, inside this border, nurses are caring for and tending to the needs of their patients.
Nightingale also wrote, “It may be the surgeon who saves the life of the patient, but it is the nurse that shows that patient how to live.”
Today is the start of National Nurses Week. However, nurses’ sacred work is an everyday practice.
Here are three things, among many, to celebrate about nurses:
Celebrating nursing is about expressing deep gratitude to those who have committed themselves to the profession of nursing and care for all of us in our hospitals and communities around the globe.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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