After reading about At Your Cervix’s pet peeve, I decided to share one of my own:
Don’t you miss nursing?
As a nurse working outside of clinical care, I get this a lot. While I know inquisitors mean no ill, it perturbs me.
No, I don’t miss nursing because I am still nursing. While I may not comfort a patient through a traumatic experience or beautifully multi-task the care of six patients anymore, I do have a place within the nursing profession and the healthcare system.
No, I don’t have any stories fresh from the unit. No, my stories don’t involve excrement of any kind. Well, maybe sometimes. My nursing practice is one rife with the stories of leveraging human and financial resources, of walking political tightropes, of managing interoffice communication problems while trying to also focus on project deadlines, of collaborations gone wrong and oh, so right, of making sure all the pieces of the puzzle come together at the right time, of leading during times of uncertainty, of seeing teams work with passion toward excellence. My nursing practice is nursing.
We all use the same process to guide our intervention efforts from assessment through evaluation. We all see or hear others’ needs and act upon them with trained, critical skills. We all meet our responsibilities with both an art and a science. No matter our country of practice, we’re all guided by similar codes of ethics.
Don’t you miss nursing?
Someday I will answer this, “Yes.” Today is not that day because even though not everyone realizes it, I’m still in the thick of it, working to impact the lives of patients.
