Thom - Come Back Home

Thom -







Most people assume that bringing men into the nursing profession will help raise not only the standard, but the pay as well. It’s actually a false assumption. Men are just looking to have the same rights that women do in the profession – the scheduling issues, the training opportunities, the advancement. There is still this pervasive attitude that only men have power, and that women should remain subservient in health care. But let’s take a broad look at the global issue. We have more women in the advanced practice roles, and in the administrative roles. While they’re making their own career choices and advancing, they are helping us, the men, further our own personal beliefs that we can care; its okay for a man to cry, it’s okay if we only want certain shifts to take care of our children, just as women do.

In dealing with that, the women unconsciously mentor us in return. While they’re trying to push us forward, we want to stay within our own comfort zone. When we’re ready, we’ll step forward. But as much as we would like to move forward, we don’t have the opportunities women do. It seems much harder for men to get into the advanced practice roles. You hear things like, “Well, you’ll always need a female chaperone,” or, “That’s not a specialty that men really should get into.” So it becomes a gender issue instead of a nursing issue.

When I was a nursing student, I had faculty who were very supportive of me. They would place me in opportunities where I could excel.”“Human first. Nursing later.” One instructor said to me, “I can put you in any environment, and you can figure it out on your own. At the time, I was just trying to pass the class, frankly. But then, when it was all over and done with, the same instructor came back to me and said, “You will be a great nurse. You may not be the best test-taker, but you will be a nurse that people will remember.”

I know that I am the face of the American nurse, and as an instructor myself now, I’m going to change the global perspective of “nurse.” Nursing is not about the technical skills. It’s about how you nurse. You take the perspective of the person for whom you are caring. Having been a nurse who has experienced good and bad outcomes, sometimes it’s not what you do with your hands, but what you do in the silence of your delivery. Are you just standing there listening? Are you offering that touch? It could be that simple foot rub that relieves pain for someone without you ever saying a word. You’ve done something human. “Human nursing” is so far behind. We have so many obstacles against us; the resources, the staffing, the money, the availability of things. Why take the human factor out of it? This is a human being. They have their own special needs. Against your own grain, you do what you need to do to take care of them, because it’s about them.

To me, it doesn’t matter if you’re an associate degree nurse, a baccalaureate-prepared nurse, or a master’s-prepared nurse. I lump everybody together in the same category. No matter how many credentials you have, you’re still a nurse. You just have more refined skills. I’m fond of saying, “Come back home…you’re a nurse.”

In today’s healthcare, it’s hard to beat the system. But it makes a difference if you keep that human factor in there. Once as a traveling nurse, I was in a 90-day assignment that I couldn’t wait to finish. As I was nursing in the hallway with no resources, I was given this listless child who was about to go. So I first just comforted this child, and did what I had to do as a human being. I even told everyone around, “I’m going to be very busy right now. If you have something else, I will get to you, but let me work with this child first.” And then I brought that child back to life who was actually very badly dehydrated and running a fever. That child had pneumonia but the mother, a non-English speaker, didn’t know how to communicate. So in the emergency room, the triage nurse had gotten frustrated with her and thought, “Well, it’s just another childhood sickness.” Based on that wrong assumption the child waited too long, and basically needed fluid volume resuscitation very quickly. When I heard his first cry come back, it confirmed to me that I was human enough to make that difference, and I could nurse later. Human first, nursing later. And everybody around me was crying and saying, “I’ve not ever known another nurse who would do that in this place.” That was my qualifier that no matter how horrible a place was going to be for the remainder of my time there, the community would know that a good nurse had stepped in.

My validation for my whole nursing career was when I was standing at Ground Zero on 9/11 and looking at what I was supposed to do, either as a nurse or a human being. And I said, “I don’t have to be a nurse here. I can be a human being.” I chose to not do the nursing sector on that day. I actually volunteered giving foot massages, working in the chow line, and just listening to people and letting them know it was okay. It’s a day I want to remember for the rest of my life. Most people want to forget bad things, but this is something I want to remember. And I share the experience with my students, or, as I call them, my little chickadees. I tell them there comes a point where you need to leave the textbook behind. They need that real-world experience sometimes, in a good storytelling way, so they can learn from it.

Power Strategies: Connection, Influence, Power
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