In the 1990’s film “The Doctor”, William Hurt’s stereotypically arrogant physician character was quickly put in place by a nasty throat cancer diagnosis. The doctor, who, prior to getting sick, had looked upon patients as mechanical problems to be solved, was now in his patient’s shoes. Actually he was in their backless hospital gowns and flimsy cardboard slippers.
I have personally observed more nurses go into nursing school because of their own experience as patients, then doctors. The doctors and medical students I’ve spoken to were generally motivated by the career itself, the desire to “make a difference” or the illness of a loved one.
I was already a nursing student by the time I embarked upon my extended experience in the health care experience as a scoliosis patient undergoing major surgery. However, while it did not determine my decision to become a nurse, my experience as a patient did help me determine what kind of nurse I wanted to be.
The main lessons I took from my hospital bed back to nursing school were regarding the importance of privacy, being pain free, comfort, sleep and other essentials of daily life. Most of these topics are covered in nursing school but it’s difficult to adequately understand how they contribute to a patient’s overall sanity, well-being and ultimately ability to recover unless you experience them for yourself.
There are some things you can learn in school but most things you cannot. At the heart of being a nurse is the ability to empathize with your patients. Patient boundaries, a code of ethics and a constantly critical mind keeps the nurse’s emotions in check.
Obviously it’s unrealistic to think that every nursing student will at some point in their life switch roles with their patients, like “The Doctor” did on the big screen. But it is realistic for nursing students to make every reasonable attempt to understand what their patients are going through.
Honestly, the most critical parts of the hospital experience for patients will never make it into your nursing care plan – food, water, sleep, privacy, comfort, avoiding loneliness and feeling safe. These are the things that we cherish in our daily lives yet it becomes all too easy for health care providers to overlook them while attending to a patient’s condition, rather than attending to the patient.
As a nursing student caring for only one or two patients, this is the ideal time to observe and learn from your patients. In a way, they are your unpaid, volunteer nursing instructors.
You may recall that one of the big “pre-swine flu” news stories (remember those days of recent past?) was about the nursing shortage in the U.S. What many of the media outlets covering this story failed to clarify is that the nursing shortage is technically more of an impending one, with over one million nurses needed by 2010. This is the year when the number of aging baby boomers requiring skilled nursing care is expected to peak. There are of course other elderly patients and patients across all demographics that will also require more nursing care as chronic illnesses such as heart disease, stroke and cancer gain prevalence.
