Health Care System

In 2000, Richard Cowling, Sue Hagedorn, and Peggy Chinn came together to write the Nurse Manifesto, which is the backbone of the Nurse Manifest Project grassroots movement. I thought that over these summer months, it would be interesting to look at the Manifesto itself, and relate how the Manifesto can be used to support change in our practices and ultimately help facilitate our sovereignty as a profession.

Taking a look at the Nurse Manifesto Vision statement is a good place to start:

Vision

We believe in a world in which:

Nurses practice healing with transformative results.
Nurses support, mentor, and nurture one another through participation in learning, researching, and practicing.
Nurses act from our most fundamental values.
Nurses control our own work lives.
Nurses are strong and creative in the face of adversity.
Nurses are powerful as healers and as participants in caring and healing processes.(Cowling, Hagedorn, & Chinn, 2000).

I believe the vision requires close attention, to today I will focus on the first concept, that nurses practice healing with transformative results.

I know that the vision statement can be enacted in the academic setting, and that the academic setting is a good place to start with creating change in the applied practice setting. I would love to see a world where nurses are supported to their full healing abilities; I recently finished teaching a summer Reiki course with RN- BSN (and a few ASN) students. Reiki is a hands on healing modality that is gaining acceptance and popularity in many settings from acute care to cancer care centers. The results of the class were amazing, as students began to focus on their own self-care and self-use of Reiki in order to be able to share Reiki with their patients, colleagues, and loved ones.

Reiki is a hands on healing modality.

As the students learned Reiki techniques, they felt empowered to use Reiki at the bedside with dying and demented patients, newborn infants and their mothers, and in support of their colleagues who suffer from workplace stress, which shows up as symptoms such as headaches and burnout. They used Reiki to help themselves and loved ones sleep at night, to provide distance healing for those in need, and to address a number of personal emotional and traumatic experiences that likely relate to their effectiveness as healers.

Reiki transfers healing universal life energy, "Ki", to the recipeint; it can do no harm.

I believe this sort of applied healing experience begins to support nurses in acknowledging and experiencing their natural ability to act as healers. Most nurses are initially drawn to nursing to act as healers and to support folks in their transformative experiences, however the academic and workplace settings regularly fail to support nurses in enacting their calling toward healing.

I would love to hear what you are doing to “support a world in which nurses practice healing with transformative results”.

References: Cowling, R., Chinn, P.L., & Hagedorn, S. (2000). The Nurse Manifesto. Retrieved July 7, 2011 from https://nursemanifest.com/manifesto.htm

A landmark report on the FUTURE OF NURSING was issued last fall by the Institute of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation. There are four major recommendations:

Nurses should practice to the full extent of their education and training.
Nurses should achieve higher levels of education and training through an improved education system that promotes seamless academic progression.
Nurses should be full partners, with physicians and other health care professionals, in redesigning health care in the United States.
Effective workforce planning and policy making require better data collection and information infrastructure.

Each of these recommendations are framed in language that is well suited to public policy-making, but if we read these recommendations from a “Nurse Manifest” lens, they take on even greater importance! Take, for example, the idea of “full extent of [our] education and training.” If nursing education reaches the ideals that we have set forth in the “Manifesto” where education is concerned, all of health care could be radically re-invented!

I believe that more nurses than we imagine have ideals about nursing that are very similar to the values that we described on the initial NurseManifest.com web site. Let’s brainstorm ways we can better connect with the “Future of Nursing” initiatives going on all around the U.S., and keep these values in the forefront!