GBNC

HEART.

It may be hard to define but we all know it when we see it. Shakespeare called it the glorious intangible. Heart is the will to do and the soul to dare. It’s two parts caring, and three parts passion. It’s people who give more than they take. Nurses….individually and collectively create the HEART of care and healing ……bringing passion and commitment each and every hour of every single day to patients and their families.      

Mary Beth Williams MN, RN
Executive Director, Patient Care Services
Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center

Last week, Carol Conley referenced that the art of nursing is “care of strangers” and the performance of this art takes place quietly where people know little about it. 

This 4 minute Oscar winning video entitled, Joy and Heron, visually captures the type of art that is found in nursing and which connects us to each other while caring for others. Viewing this video reflects the gratifying joy found in these quiet interactions; attentive to the needs of others in the little moments and making a meaningful connection in ways that are often invisible to others.

Mary Beth Williams MN, RN
Executive Director, Patient Care Services
Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center

In the publication, Celebrating Nurses: A Visual History, author Dr Christine Hallet provides a beautifully written history of nursing with pictures depicting our profession since inception.  For today’s reflection about joy in our practice, I am sharing several particularly poignant passages which I believe capture perfectly the work that we do.

Nursing work is, by its very nature, heroic.  It is not possible to be an effective nurse without engaging with the physical damage and emotional distress of patients.  The ability to be engaged without being destroyed is the most extraordinary element of nursing expertise; it is also the least visible and the least appreciated.  Through the millennia of experience, nurses working with suffering and vulnerable people have handed down from expert to novice, their understanding of how to offer real help to patients without themselves succumbing to despair: that is their art.

Nurses draw their family a large circle.  The art of nursing is “care of strangers”.  Its practitioners perform work that is beyond the capacity of informal caregivers- family and friends. Nurses are, as Patricia Donahue said, among the greatest artists the world has ever known;  yet the performance of their art takes place in secret, and the majority of us know little about it.

Have a joyful day!
Carol