The gown card reads “holding up a mirror to the actions of nursing will allow open transparency in healthcare. We have to do it ourselves, no one else is doing it for us.”
No idea what prompted that gown card.
But it holds true every day.
The nursing profession must continuously put a mirror on the actions of the profession. This will lead to openness and honesty in healthcare. And this can only be a good thing and lead to safer patient care.
Do we all want the same things? Safe patients, safe employees?
Yes. Well, most of us.
But it is not ingrained in some of the healthcare workers that this is a job, yes. But their actions lead to more than a paycheck. For too many healthcare workers, their job is only to get paid. No more, no less.
It begs the question, has something been lost in healthcare today?
If we don’t ask the hard questions now and show these paycheck-only healthcare workers that nursing is so much more than the paycheck, what does nursing become in the future?
Everyone who has ever been in the healthcare system, as a nurse, as a worker, as a patient, should be concerned about this slide.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 