While there is much that I love about nursing and about being a nurse, there are times when it bores me to tears, times when I feel I have been dropped down a rabbit hole time warp, times when I despair for its future. My current list includes:
- When the Cult of Florence Nightingale is invoked as the one and only true vision of modern nursing;
- When busy (and boring) Powerpoint slides are used as props to make any and all (mostly vacuous) statements;
- When nurse academic-types staunchly defend an old, tired, narrow-minded, biomedical model of ‘nursing research’ as the one and only true version of research;
- When older, privileged white women (who seemingly are blithely unaware of their privilege) are nursing’s chosen leaders and spokespersons.
There are effective antidotes to this despair and I will share my list in a follow-up post.