Are there only five? No, but if we listed them all we’d be here all day.
Happy National Nurses’ Week! We appreciate our colleagues in nursing every day, but once a year, we enjoy the opportunity to celebrate a little bit more enthusiastically. But instead of bringing chocolate to a breakroom and throwing off your meal planning for the week, we’re giving you our top ten list of why nurses are so amazing.
(1) You’re brilliant.
Through our Skin, Wound, and Ostomy courses, we have the opportunity to interact with nurses from all over the country. In addition to your college or university degree, many of you have pursued specialties, master’s degrees, and certifications (like ours!). You’re always learning more, growing your expertise, heading to workshops, and keeping up with the latest.
(2) You’re great with people.
People skills are not optional for great nurses. Even at the end of long shift, you can treat a patient and their family with care and compassion, confronting their fears, worries, and sometimes hostility and anger. You use humor to defuse tenions (and you use humor to remember that of course, these folks are in a tough spot and you’re a seasoned professional). You’re a paragon of “not taking it personally,” and we admire that trait!
(3) You don’t mind getting your hands dirty.
Medicine can be messy. Long-term care is always messy. And wound care? Well, you know. It can be a lot sometimes. But nurses know that the dirty jobs are what keep patients healthy, and we admire your toughness!
(4) You’re endurance athletes.
Some people think marathon runners are impressive, or triatheletes, or those crazy people on American Ninja Warrior. In our opinion, all those folks - amazing though they are! - have nothing on nurses. Nurses work ten to twelve hour shifts, deal with crises and complications and emergencies on a regular basis, walk miles each day, and still manage to stay organized, stay sane, and stay caring and professional. (Just see if whoever wins the Boston Marathon can educate a patient and their family on compliance at the end of the race.)
(5) You save lives.
Hospitals and care facilities simply wouldn’t work without nurses. You provide critical information to doctors and other healthcare providers, you monitor moment-to-moment changes in patients, and you’re an integral part of the collaborative care team surrounding patients. Doctors might get a lot of credit, but we all know that it’s a team sport, and in our opinion, nurses are often the MVP!
So to all our amazing colleagues and friends in nursing: thank you! We appreciate and value you so much, and during National Nurses’ Week, we hope you feel the love we feel for you all year long!
Skilled Wound Care is a mobile surgical practice committed to transforming the chronic wound care model in nursing facilities. Wound care experts make weekly bedside visits to patients in long-term care facilities, avoiding transfers to hospitals or clinics. Our expert physicians give patients the most up-to-date and effective wound treatments, and educate facility staff on how to help patients continue to heal quickly and effectively between visits. This model of collaborative care allows SWC’s physicians to improve patients’ lives and health outcomes, to empower nursing staff, and to raise public awareness. Skilled Wound Care, along with its nurse and nursing home partners, is working every day to positively transform traditional nursing home wound care.