Respect Our Work

Respect Our Work.

Respect My Work.

I really like this slogan.  However, it occurs to me that whilst I support this sentiment wholeheartedly, because I think that unless someone has actually been exposed to nursing care, in whatever form it has taken, the "general public" do not actually know what nurses do.  And as a group, we do not do a good job of educating them.  Which leads me to my issue with the slogan.

How can we demand "people" to respect our work, when we do not really respect it ourselves?  Do not get your back up just yet.  What I mean by this is when a nurse says they work in a hospital, or in a specific specialty, or in a medical ward as opposed to a surgical ward, or general medical, or in the community, or in mental health, or in aged care or for an agency.. or whatever their job is, the first reaction of other nurses is to scrunch up their noses and say something akin to "eww! I could never do that, how can you work THERE?"  Do not deny it - you know you have done it :-P  I know I have done it.  We let people refer to us as "just nurses" - WE refer to ourselves as "just nurses".  This is not an empowering way to refer to yourself - personally OR professionally.

Why do we compartmentalise ourselves as per the medical model?

Once again, before you arc up.. I do not think that nurses should "just nurse".  What I think is that nurses whould not define themselves as per a medical specialty, but gain knowledge and tools in order to use that specialty to make their nursing better.  As a nurse, there is nothing more frustrating than having to wait for "outlier" teams and consultants to review patients.  It is a necessary evil when specialist teams act as their own entities.  Shame our bodies do not work as separate systems who fail to communicate with the others.

Why do nurses feel that they need to define themselves as per their knowledge?  Nursing is, apparently, about wholistic care, and yet the first thing we do is say, "That is not my specialty, I can not provide individualised care to this patient."  What rubbish!  That betrays your insecurity in your clinical knowledge, clinical judgement and ability to observe.  True, you may not know the nuances of some specific issue, but as a nurse, you have the ability (one would hope) to source the right information and if necessary, the right person to assist you in taking the opportunity to either learn about the issue, or have a more qualified person sort it out.  Apart from that issue, there is a person who needs to be looked after.  Do you not look after Mr Jones' blood pressure and blood sugar when he has a broken leg on an orthpaedic ward?  When Mr Jones' leg has healed and he comes back as a patient on the renal ward, do you dismiss the fact that he has had a broken leg and needs a stick to walk around because you only know about his kidneys?  Do you ring up the orthopaedic ward, in sheer terror spouting "but he had a broken leg!" No.  Acknowledge that your specialist knowledge is a tool that you use to provide specialised nursing care, not define that you will only be able to REALLY give good care to someone who has been admitted under a specialist medical teams list.

Nurses are the largest workforce in the health system.  You wouldn't know it.  We treat the staff on our ward as the only ones who matter.  Nurses who complain about tasks not done by the previous shift shit me.  Nurses who think that their area matters more because they have external deadlines which must mean they are more important shit me.  If, as nurses, we rallied together rather than let hospital administrations (or doctors, or governments, or whoever) pit us against each other for resources and staff (and whatever else we fight over.. recognition?), we would be most powerful.  We have moments.  The Victorian nurses have proven that.  But then, we go back to our own corners and lick our wounds and go back to complaining about the staff on the next ward again.

Without nurses, there would be no health system.  At least in the way that we know it now.  How different would it be if you had a loved on in hospital and it was your duty, as family, to provide them with care.  You would have to be there 24/7, feed them, bathe them, attend to their every need.  Doctors would have to actually treat their patients hands on! They would have to spend time with their patients several times a day to administer medications, do wound dressings, monitor input and output (maybe that would be your job - they would like you to report it).  The  list could go on.  Nurses serve as a buffer for both.  They should advocate for you as the patient.  It is hard to do some times (actually more times than you think) because medical teams tell patients things without telling the nursing staff the plan, or ignore things that nurses are told by patients, because patients do not think to tell doctors some piece of information that is actually important.  Patients confide in nurses, because we are these when are most vulnerable.  By being spread too thin, nurses have lost the time to be able to do the compassionate aspects of nursing.  Or rather, they have to choose between being a nurse who cares for their patients, or being a nurse who ticks boxes relating to the tasks they have to do.  If you are the former, the patients love you, but your colleagues complain constantly about the tasks that have not been completed.  If you are the latter, it is worse again!  The tasks are done, but there is little love for your job and vice versa.  A good analogy is the comparison between being a theoretical scientist and one who is an applied scientist.  Or even any field of knowing the theory and information, and those who put those theories into practice. 

I have picked this post off after leaving it a couple of days, and it has morphed into something else.. so I will stop here, and post..  I think I have learned that even if I have to think on a topic before I post, leaving it a few days might make it a bit disjointed.  *shrug* I am sure I will get back to this topic in a further rant ;-)

PS I'd like to acknowledge that there are areas in which nurses do need to be defined as their specialty.. like midwives.. but then, those specialties are defining themselves by creating their own qualifications, like Bachelor of Midwifery, as opposed to a post graduate specialty on a general nursing background.  I just wish that nurses thought of themselves as nurses, before they thought of themselves as specialist nurses because in narrowing their focus, their peripheral vision is becoming dull.