Dianna - Embrace the Change

Dianna -







Recently, I celebrated my 40th nursing reunion. It was absolutely wonderful. I started my diploma nursing program when I was barely eighteen, and graduated just a few weeks after my twenty-first birthday … I was so very young. And even though it has been forty years and many of us hadn’t seen each other at all in that time, we’re still good friends. After all those years!

One of my first jobs was at a dialysis center. This was back in the days before Medicare, so not everybody who needed dialysis was able to get it. There was a committee of physicians and community people who decided whether or not people would be accepted for dialysis. They essentially decided who lived and who died. I remember thinking, “Well, if you’re young and have a family, do you live? If you were a successful businessman, do you live?” Besides being confronted with the inequity of the situation, it I gained a lot of experience in dealing with patients who were dying, and extending myself to those patients and their families. Love and compassion are important for me.

I really am a people person, and I believe we must treat each other with love and respect. Hands-on caring is really important to me and I’ve always exhibited that, whether I’m working with staff or patients or administrators. But over the years, I’ve observed that love and respect doesn’t necessarily get extended by nurses to nurses. We tend to eat our young. As a new nurse you have to be strong, and you have to be really good at what you do. I always felt so successful and qualified in everything I did. But we really didn’t think that we should admit to needing help. We all had friends who helped us, and I had family that was supportive but we really didn’t expect that support at work, from our superiors.

There has been a lot of personal tragedy in my life. I lost a sister to breast cancer, and both my parents died as well. I went through a divorce, was downsized from my job, and later was diagnosed with breast cancer myself. As difficult as those experiences have been, some of them also presented me with opportunities. After going through treatment for cancer, I had the chance to attend a hospice conference on therapeutic touch. This is a type of energy work developed by a nurse in the 1970s. It’s all about healing and caring, and love and compassion for people, so it got back to that love and compassion I cherished when I started my nursing career. I decided to get a graduate certificate in Spirituality, Health and Medicine. It has really opened my mind to look at medicine in a very different, non-conventional way.

We’re pressured for time and the patients’ needs are urgent and therefore it is easy for nurses to forget about taking care of themselves and in some situations, even discouraged from taking care of ourselves. I was guilty of this and I consider myself one of the worst self-neglectors, the absolute worst. I didn’t take care of myself at all. I considered myself Super Woman – I could handle my sister dying, my parents illnesses and deaths, working full-time at a very demanding job, volunteering, church activities. I was convinced that I was Super Woman and could do it, I didn’t really realize that I believed I didn’t have a choice. It took time to realize that I really needed to take care of myself and so does every nurse.

Creating a healing environment for staff, wherever you work, is something to which I’m really committed. You treat people with dignity and respect; you’re honest and you deal with conflict openly and directly – deal with issues, not people. Behaviors may have to change, but that doesn’t make someone a good or bad person."The health care system is broken. That's not going to get fixed right away, so what do we do in the meantime? We can take care of each other." From there, you move on to caring competencies, which is where you develop a self-care plan that includes looking at spiritual, mental and social needs. I’ve given my staff an opportunity to create self-care plans. This is something I feel is important, because one year I had five nurses going through divorce at the same time. On the one hand, you can say keep it at home. But that’s silly. We’re a family at work; you can’t solve people’s problems but you can be sensitive. I’d much rather spend my time with my staff, listening to their stories and letting them be involved in decisions than sitting across the table with a grievance and the union.

You’re going to have to listen to people, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Many people think it’s too touchy-feely. They don’t want to go there. There are a lot of pressures in health care, I’m not going to deny that. Being sensitive towards and taking time to be respectful of people and their lives is a priority at the bottom of the barrel. But think about it, it can’t be if you’re going to recruit and retain staff, you want them to have a supportive environment.

Administrators don’t want to pay for the training – that’s just crazy because we’re going to have to in order to have a healthy, educated nursing profession. The health care system is broken and it’s not going to get fixed right away, so what do we do in the meantime? We can take care of each other and do it better than we’ve done it in the past. When I think back, I have to admit I was an incredible workaholic. It’s just unbelievable when I think about it. I don’t even know how I did it. But I had to; it was part of my life.

Nursing is changing and new nurses don’t know the difference. We long-timers need to get over it and embrace the change. Find ways to take care of yourself, and be somewhat assertive in saying what you need. If you do, the patients will be cared for and nursing will thrive. With all the technology, nursing has to change. We must embrace the changes, because there’s not enough nurses. We need a way for nurses to take care of themselves and show that care to the patient – the caring aspect of why we are nurses.

Power Strategies: Empathy, Respect, Achievement
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