An Homage to Nurses, Everywhere

As we head into National Nurses Week, it seems only fitting that we turn the focus to them and all their dedicated work to take care of our patients. We must sound out a call to help them find their place in creating the best healthcare system we can deliver.

The nurses we work with provide invaluable services and care for our patients across the full spectrum of clinical settings, doing their darndest to take care of everybody, no matter what. They come to work each day; do what they can; go the extra mile; put in their blood, sweat, and tears; and never give in. Without them, we would be lost.

Whenever I've written about things that work -- and things that don't work -- in our tortured and fractured healthcare system, I usually list all the different types of roles involved, making sure that we don't leave anybody out. But if we left out the nurses, we, and our patients, would be nowhere. They are an invaluable cog in the machinery of taking care of people and experts in the masterful art of the human touch, delivering care so critical to the lives of our patients.

The burden has been immeasurable and at times almost unbearable over the past few years, exaggerated and accentuated by the pandemic, which has only helped highlight the inequities that our patients have to deal with. It has also highlighted the terrible systems we've created -- systems that put endless bureaucratic nonsense in the way of trying to do what the nurses, like all the rest of us, are trying to do.

Whether on the inpatient services, in the emergency department, or in the ambulatory world, their lives are filled with endless clicks in the electronic medical record and adherence to archaic bureaucratic rules whose origins and purpose no one can ever explain, all of which seem to get more in the way of taking care of patients rather than helping them.

As we move to build a better system, we need to bring everybody along. That includes not only every patient and every community that has faced barriers to access in our fractured healthcare system, but also every person -- in every role in healthcare -- who is trying to do what they can, who has something to give. Our nurses need to be part of the conversation, coming up with creative ideas that will help them do what they know our patients need. They have to be part of the solution, just as all the rest of us are.

Nurses need to be there as we build out our clinical teams, extending care beyond the walls of the clinical practice and past the confines of the woefully inadequate 20-minute visit. Our patients need education, including culturally sensitive explorations of their barriers to care, as well as more time and tender loving care, more people listening, and more people supporting them. Our patients need what nurses have to offer: helping them understand their diseases and how they impact their health and welfare, how to take their medicines, how to live their best lives.

We need our nurses to be part of solutions, involving them in continuous care, remote patient monitoring, extending visits through telehealth and video visits, and working in the community to help find solutions to problems that plague everyone. We need to give them the technology they need -- the artificial intelligence and effective electronic medical record tools and the best data culled from the vast amounts of healthcare information buried in the system -- to get our patients the best outcomes we possibly can.

So, to all of them -- from those just deciding to enter the field of nursing to those in training, to those fresh out of nursing school in their first clinical jobs, to our most seasoned clinical nurses on the floors and in doctor's offices, operating rooms, emergency departments, and everywhere else, to our most senior established academic nurse clinician educators, let me just say this:

We're glad you are here with us, glad you are here by our sides, glad you are here for our patients. We look forward to having you fighting the good fight with us to build a better healthcare system and tear down the rest of the nonsense that seems to just get in the way. Thank you, and we're with you all the way.

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