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RN Shelly Lopez Gray recently shared one way to be a great nurse in one of her Huffington Post pieces. See if you agree with what she has to say in the excerpts below:
The beginning:
When I initially graduated from nursing school, I thought I wanted to be a nursery nurse. When I got hired in L&D, I thought I had my foot in the door, and eventually I would transition to the nursery. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with OB, and having the baby as my primary patient became the last thing on my to-do list. I quickly learned a golden rule in maternal-newborn nursing: labor and delivery nurses don’t usually like working in the nursery, and nursery nurses don’t usually want to work in OB!
What she sees as an important part of nursing:
For any nurse out there—whether you’re the nurse [who] loves to take care of the mother, or the nurse [who] really loves taking care of those babies (the good ones, and ones [who] like a little drama!)—remember what we are all working for. We all want healthy moms, we all want healthy babies, and our patients need someone to fight for this. Be the nurse [who] speaks up. Be the nurse who questions things. Be the nurse who wants to better themselves for their patients, their practice, and their profession. We have to find ways to better ourselves, our unit, our hospital, our community, and our profession. We all have to be someone’s superhero. We can’t forget that, and we have to remind others, because the health of our mothers and our babies depends on this. So the next time you’re at work, look at the people around you.
Her bottom line:
Be thankful for the scrub tech who will scramble to go get you help, the provider who allows us all of us nurses to do our secret work, the nursery nurse [who] can stay calm while pinking-up a colorless baby, and the labor nurse who works so hard for a healthy delivery…and remember that we are all someone’s superhero.
Read her full story over on the Huffington Post. Then, in the comments below, tell us what you think about the post, and whether or not you agree with her.
