When I look back on my journey in nursing, I can see my many strengths. With short staffing and many other difficulty issues in nursing, I have learned to enjoy nursing, by taking on many daily challenges we face. This is reflective in me voluntarily joining a nursing retention committee and being part of my hospitals shared governance committee. And also independently addressing issues my unit and the hospital faced, by writing letters to the appropriate members in management.
In the nursing retention committee I helped new nurses along their journey by being a mentor to them. I also went to regularly scheduled meetings on my days off to discuss ways to help retain new nurses and discuss the hiring process.
In being a member of the shared governance committee, I was able to work with other members to make improvement to our unit. With my mindset of continually looking for new ideas and solutions to problems I was able to bring many new concepts to my unit. With my suggestions and the help of other team members I was able to get clocks in the patient rooms, thank you and sympathy cards for leaving patients, the introduction of DiPP, a process on how to handle possible problematic interactions, a patient transfer board, a new and bigger staff lounge, reduction in needle sticks by using different medication and many more innovations.
Independently I wrote letters to management to deal with safe staffing issues, the application of female urinals for patient comfort, advocating for emergency codes for violent patients or visitors, the use of mock emergency codes and addressing any other visitors, patients and staff problems . Issues I addressed or presented was not only focused on nurses or patients but any staff regardless of title or position.
Presently and independently I have advocated for higher toilet seats to help reduce patient strain while sitting, as the present ones are to low, I have advocated for visitor rules and policies and now my favorite one, positive and inspirational quotes on the walls in the patients rooms.
When I look back at my accomplishments, I realize that soon the inspirer will just be a memory and nobody will remember the person who lived by the motto ” work smarter not harder”, however internally I am proud of my accomplishments and the part I have played in nursing.
Here is a sample of one of the articles I wrote for my hospitals magnet nursing journey magazine. How to reduce needle sticks for patient comfort. With this article some patients on my unit were able to get injections once or twice a day with the use of enoxaparin instead of three times a day with heparin.
