WHAT’S YOUR STORY?
By: American Nurses Association
Every Nurse has Great Stories – Time to Share Yours
In 2020, the Year of the Nurse, our stories are at the forefront of celebrating our unique honor and advancing the profession. Your own personal stories are the best way to promote greater understanding of the breadth and diversity of our profession and show how nurses improve health and deliver high quality health care.
The ANA has created two initiatives for your stories:
- Nurse Story Submissions, capturing the spirit of nursing through written and spoken words, video and photos.
- The Nurses Month Webinar, a 60-minute class focusing on helping us all master storytelling, and better advance our profession through sharing our stories.
As this Nursing Center article points out, “Everyone knows clinicians, perhaps they do not know the true stories of nurses nor have they focused on listening to the nurses’ stories… story telling is a lost art in the health care leadership field and a lost art in a professional field such as nursing, which is so rich with stories.”
“If nurses’ stories were valued and listened to, nurses would feel more energized, motivated, and respected, and their patients would reap the benefits in service and in quality.”
Through stories, you can gain trust, build relationships, shape culture, and assist leaders and staff in reaching goals. Learning about your patient’s inner world is just as important as learning about his or her outer world. Sharing stories provides one way to learn about this inner world while helping to create an emotional bond between caregiver and patient. For example, Massachusetts General uses clinical narratives to enhance clinical skills and further their nurses’ professional development.
Stories influence others, build empathy, inspire action, and transform opinions. Whether set at a patient’s side during a crisis, at moments of birth, crisis or death, or just going through the daily adventures of being a nurse, they can make you cry, think, laugh, and reflect on the truth about nursing and health care.
This article in American Nurse talks about specific ways to use stories with your different patients. Sharing stories is a great way to learn about their inner world while helping to create an emotional bond between caregiver and patient.
See how first-person accounts of clinical experiences help Mass General nurses >
Discover how to apply storytelling for different kinds of patients in your practice >
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