Treating nursing as 'just a job' harms both nurses and patients. New approaches reduce burnout, improve care, and challenge the victim narrative.

DEERFIELD BEACH, FL, UNITED STATES, January 21, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Caring and nursing are, at their core, the same thing. Nurses, who make up nearly half of the global health workforce, provide millions of people with the compassion foundational to medicine. Unsurprisingly, caring for humanity is no easy task. Underfunded, overworked and exhausted: those are the adjectives many would use to describe the world’s nearly 27 million nurses. After decades of increasing demand, cemented by a pandemic, it might be hard to imagine anything different. Take a step back and focus on the highly skilled act of caring, however, and we can see that nurses are anything but victims.

How can nurses reclaim their power when they work in systems that treat them like robots? The simple answer: they can’t. Reducing nursing to ‘just a job’ rather than a gratifying profession strips nurses and patients of their humanity and leads to the dehumanizing working conditions that nurses have become aligned with. Hospitals that have trailed alternative nursing theories, however, found that burnout and secondary trauma reduced among staff, and that patient perceptions o...