This article is about the growing public opinion that nurses are irresponsible and money oriented and, how this opinion discourages people from pursuing nursing as a carreer. This article is based on my observations and experience.
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Before pursuing nursing as a career, I had a bad impression of nurses from what I had heard but I never propagated it.
A couple of years ago when my grandmother had a knee surgery, I got a chance to look closely into how nurses provide care and communicate with patients and their family. I noticed how therapeutically the nurses talked to my grandmother. They explained everything so well and even answered the relevant questions I asked out of curiosity. Never before this episode did I ever want to be a nurse.
When I talked to some friends about my positive views about nursing and nurses, I was confused to hear what they had to say. Occasionally, people have opposing views but if they are contrary to what you believe in you start to doubt your own observations, it can be disturbing.
One of my friends openly declared that nurses are evil and work solely for money and do not really care about their patients. They care for the patient just enough to keep themselves out of trouble but they ignore a patient's unsaid obvious needs like positioning, which make them cruel.
Such views about nurses lead me to think if real nurses have forgotten their ethics but, something inside me said that these views are a stereotype. I decided to venture into the world of nursing to unravel the truth myself.
I have finished the first year of my nursing program and I am still determined to be a nurse. During my field placement at a hospital, I figured out the driving force behind the different opinions about nurses - the positive and the negative. Nurses follow some nursing ethics which form the very basis of their job.
Patient wellness, patient confidentiality, truthfulness, fairness and respecting patient choices are the values that need to be adopted in order to be a nurse, but does everybody has the ability to do so?
To be tough, caring, agile and strong enough to keep secrets all at once may not be the qualities present in a single person. People have preconceived notions about good nurses and they want them to 'act' accordingly. What they don't know is that it takes time for different personalities to incorporate a nurse's qualities.
People have different personalities and when they become nurses, their way of providing care and communicating with others differs. People categorize nurses as friendly or unfriendly, knowledgeable or unknowledgeable, caring or negligent etc.
It cannot be denied that negligence by nurses have lead to serious medical consequences for patients. However, it does not imply that all nurses are irresponsible. Despite all the hard work that nurses do, people seem to complain. Over a dozen of people I talked to had low opinion about nurses but only three of them had actually witnessed poor treatment by nurses. Why and how did the rest form a bad image of nurses? Maybe the same way I had formed it when I believed what people said.
Nurses are neither angels nor demons, only human. They make mistakes, try to learn from them and take care not to repeat them. Does anyone realize that when people vilify the nursing profession without putting themselves in nurses' shoes, how many good-nurses-to-be are discouraged from joining it?
