Calmness, Stoicism and Kindness: Keys to Nursing

“Apprehension, uncertainty, waiting, expectation, fear of surprise, do a patient more harm than any exertion.” Florence Nightingale

Mad Nurse Ratched gave nurses a bad name. “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest“, the movie and the Ken Kesey novel, presented nurses in a harsh light. Louise Fletcher won an Academy Award for Best Actress playing the battle ax nurse. Eventually most everyone needs a nurse, and thankfully nurses fall far from the Nurse Ratched category.

Calmness and Kindness: The soft keys to nursing

Calmness is key to being a nurse. Nurses deal with patients in a state of decline, emergency or illness. Patients, and their families, are often angry, sad, confused and filled with fear. A nurse needs to be the calm at the center of patient, and their family’s, storm.

Kindness is key in dealing with the stressful kinds of storms nurses find themselves immersed in. Kindness costs nothing, and plenty of patients and their families, forget kindness in stressful situations and lash out. Patients families confusion and anger can be wrongly directed at the staff. Calmness and kindness are, again, tho of the keys to nursing. Calmness and kindness will deflect those situations and provide positivity in the worst of situations. Expecting the worst but countering it with calmness and kindness is a key nurse ingredient.

Stoicism: The final of the keys to nursing

A nurse must be stoic and have a strong stomach. Nurse’s eyes see sad things daily. Nurse’s eyes see patients in all forms of decline and with all forms of physical and mental issues. Patients roll in and roll out. Stoicism is necessary in a field in which patients often pass away and are instantly replaced with new patients teetering on the edge of death also. The stress filled patient wheel keeps on turning and so must nurses.

According to Think CNA Online the aging of the Baby Boomer Generation will be a boon for employment in the nursing industry. Nurses, both old and new, must be equipped with a healthy mixture of calmness, kindness, stoicism and the ability to do tasks few are fit to do. Someone once said nurses are angels in comfortable shoes. But those shoes can be filled with stress unless the wearers are prepared.

As a comic and as a nurse, it’s important to look calm on the surface when you’re absolutely crapping yourself inside. So, if someone is waving a machete at you, which has happened to me when I was a nurse, it’s important to make that person feel that you’re in control.
– Jo Brand

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