Nursing – Lessons From Nightingale
Nursing is the activity of helping patients recover after being cured, but still in need of special care. (Interesting is however the concept of nursing which is not limited to the healthcare. Relations also require nursing).
The lessons from Nightingale are also lessons in common sense.
First rule of nursing, to keep the air within as pure as the air without. The climate of care is as important as the care itself.
“Petty management,” she called – how to manage that what you do when you are there, shall be done when you are not there.
The most devoted friend or nurse cannot be always there. But…
“who has this art of multiplying herself-that is to say, the patient of the first (the one who is efficient) will not really be so well cared for, as the patient of the second (who is devoted).”
Much is about availability – presence:
If you look into the reports of trials or accidents and… how often the whole thing turns upon something which has happened because … the nurse … “was not there.” But … the person in charge was quite right not to be “there,” he was called away for quite sufficient reason… yet no provision was made to supply his absence. The fault was … in there being no management to supplement his “being away.” When the sun is under a total eclipse or during his nightly absence, we light candles.
Hired nurses: … make themselves intolerable by “ordering about” the other servants, under plea of not neglecting the patient. Yet … the nurse’s place is, when necessary, supplemented, and that the patient is never neglected… It is certainly not for the nurse to “order about” the servants.
Nightingale offers also a lesson on client focus:
Always sit within the patient’s view, so that when you speak to him he has not painfully to turn his head round in order to look at you.
“Careful with client diet:”
This lesson cannot easily be translated to normal non-patient-relation management:
A nurse should never put before a patient milk that is sour, meat or soup that is turned, an egg that is bad, or vegetables underdone… It is here that the clever nurse appears; she will not bring in the article, but, not to disappoint the patient, she will whip up something else in a few minutes.
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