Happy National Nurses Week to all you dedicated, compassionate, hard-working nurses out there! While you’re enjoying your free cinnamon bun and coffee, I hope you will pause to reflect on your work and on what truly fuels your continued passion for nursing (or where the heck that passion has gotten to if you have lost it).
And if you have time to read more than patients’ chart notes or community outreach notes, I hope you will pick up and read a “real” book written by nurse authors. We may be a small group compared with the vast number of physician authors, but we are growing in strength. I am proud to be a nurse and I am proud to be a nurse author in the company of some amazing, inspiring people.
As far as living nurses go, there are many who inspire, innovate, and influence me. One of these is Ruth Watson Lubic, the nurse-midwife, MacArthur “genius” award winner, and founder of the Family Health and Birth Center, located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, DC. She walks the talk of what nursing can and should do well, to “treat everyone like a human being,” to create a community-based health center where “everyone who walks in that door feels love.” Plus, she has combined direct nursing service with upstream policy work as succinctly depicted in this brief video. (And she is a way cool elder who has her own Hip Hop Saves Lives song and video!)
The American Nurses Association Ethics and Human Rights Statement of 2017 states that “Nursing is committed to both the welfare of the sick, injured, and vulnerable in society and to social justice.” It goes on to proclaim that “Nurses must always stress human rights protections with particular attention to preserving the human rights of vulnerable groups, such as the poor, the homeless, the elderly, the mentally ill, prisoners, refugees, women, children, and socially stigmatized groups.”
I am a proud nurse educator and (most days) count among my blessings, the opportunity to work with the amazing, smart, creative, and compassionate future nurses. Like the students yesterday at the Nurses Week event at Shoreline Community College. And like these University of Washington School of Nursing students at our Doorway Project pop-up community cafe who spent a sunny Sunday afternoon washing the feet of homeless young people. Dear Florence Nightingale, happy birthday and happy Nurses Week! As Florence Nightingale nurse scholar Tony Paterniti, PhD, RN states, Nightingale wasn’t only the lady with the lamp, she was also a “woman with a mission.” (Check out Dr. Paterniti’s fascinating digital archive collection on Florence Nightingale through Texas Woman’s University.)
JOSEPHINE ENSIGN 