Nurses are the Silent Rock Stars of Innovation
By: American Nurses Association
Most people don’t realize that there are 4 million registered nurses in the United States. That means that there are four times as many nurses as physicians and eight times as many nurses as pharmacists. Nurses also spend more time with patients, their families and support systems than any other member of the healthcare team. Typically, as I speak around the country on innovation related topics, I will often ask an audience of nurses to raise their hands if they are an innovator. I usually see about 25-30% of the hands go up. When I ask who has ever had to create a workaround to provide safe, timely care for a patient many more hands go up. I follow this up by asking who has “MacGyvered” anything to care for a patient, and by this point nearly all of the hands are up.
So why is it that nurses have a reluctance to see themselves as innovators? I see it as being very telling a couple of ways. First, it highlights the fact that nurses don’t use the term “innovator” to describe themselves. We need to change our terminology and use this term, so nurses know that this is who they are and that the term describes the critical thinking that they perform every day. Second, we know from the literature that nurses use approximately one workaround per hour during their shift in caring their patients. The fact that nearly every nurse has to create work arounds or “MacGyver” anything to care for a patient demonstrates what is known as positive deviance. Positive deviance is a deviation from the norm for “good” reasons, i.e. to deliver the needed care to a patient. There are examples of this every day, every shift, and can range from the simple to the complex. Safe patient care is ALWAYS the goal and nurses are encouraged to practice accordingly. Having said that, we all know that the system often breaks down leaving nurses to figure out how to provide safe care. The ingenuity of nurses has contributed to many new aspects of care, new technologies and new work environments. Nurses continue to be innovators and have the opportunity to use their skills and talents to transform health.
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