Nurse's Story: Janice - With One Voice

Janice -







There are two sides to nursing: the technical and the emotional. Both sides are equal in importance, and should be recognized for what they bring to patients. That’s a message I’ve always wanted to share with nurses, but wasn’t in a position to do it on a large scale.

After thinking about how I could best share my voice and vision for nursing, I decided to go back to school for a master’s degree in business. I knew that degree would lead to jobs in nurse management, which is how I thought I could have a voice in the future of the profession. I felt like that was where I could help nursing move forward and help nurses to have a voice. Sometimes nurses feel subservient, or that they’re not heard or they’re not powerful. I have fantasized about how powerful we could be if we could come together with one voice.

One of my most important contributions has been to keep one particular message alive, and that is that it’s critical to have nurses – not just physicians – involved in the decisions made about patients.“The nurse pulls all of the pieces together.” Nurses bring a different level of care. Where the physician comes in to diagnose and treat, the nurse manages the whole patient, checking in on the details of the care, the progress made, the social needs. The nurse pulls all of the pieces together. Voicing that message will help make a stronger health care team for patients and will help ensure nurses’ work is valued, which will make a difference in keeping and attracting quality people to the field.

I know it takes determination for nurses to stick with their work through the challenges they face. I have found that where nurses work – a hospital setting versus a clinic or other outpatient facility – may contribute to how hard it is to stay dedicated to the profession. For nurses, hospital work can be especially physically demanding. They may also end up feeling that their work is undervalued and that they don’t have enough time with patients. They may sometimes feel like they do more paperwork than they do patient care, and believe me, that’s not what keeps them coming back to work. Nurses come to work to care for patients and use their intellect – not to be stuck with reams of paperwork, or pushing pills. That does not fulfill their dreams or even their most basic goals.

My goal has been to ____________. There are people who have inspired me along my path, and one of them was the head nurse from the diploma program I completed many years ago. It was at a Catholic hospital, and that was at a time when many of the nurses were nuns. This woman – Sister Martha Joseph – is now in her nineties and lives in a nursing retirement home. I saw her recently and she said to me, “I work a shift. I sleep a shift. And sometimes I do crafts on one of the other shifts.” I thought to myself, how nice it is she still feels like nursing at ninety.

But I can understand her dedication, because it’s what I feel as well. It’s part of my being. No matter what job I do, I am a nurse. And I bring that to whatever I do. I just feel like I’m a nurse at my core. It’s rubbed off, too, my daughter is now studying to be a nurse, and she recently reconnected with an old friend from high school who is also a nurse. He wrote to her and said, “Nursing school is hard, but don’t be discouraged. Hang in there. It’s worth it in the end.” And my daughter said to me, “That’s the same advice you gave me, Mom.”

It’s important for nurses not to be discouraged about some of the barriers they’ll run into, because you run into them in every profession. Life never goes quite as smoothly as you think it’s going to go. “Don’t get too upset about the bumps in the road, but keep pursuing your dream. You are a voice for nursing in everything you say and do. Keep trying to make it better, if it’s not already what you want it to be.”

Power Strategy: Learning, Persistence, Solidarity
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