nursingforsocialjustice

There was a moment in my nursing career when I realized that my hope and optimism and care is not the same thing and being so invested in the outcome of any particular intervention (or many interventions) or action that my heart is broken and my hopes are dashed at the end of the day. There are definitely days at work when I feel overwhelmed and defeated but I think I at these moments I have learned to think about what is maki g me feel defeated. Is it because I choose to focus on trying to change something that was completely out of my control? Is it because I am letting the weight of the social injustices of the world overwhelm me? Is it because I was approaching this situation with my values and beliefs, with my understanding of what I would do if I was in this situation rather than trying to understand what the person I am working with wants to do in the same situation, with their life experience and their values and their beliefs and their wants and their needs?

At work recently a coworker brought up the view that we as health care providers sometimes slip into, a parental kind of view where the client, the patient, the program participant is viewed as a child, a cute thing that does adorable things, spoken about in the same way that I may speak about my 3 year old son. Sometimes I feel lost about how to break away and transcend the stigma of mental health issues and diagnosis. 

Sometimes I hear things that make me think. Yesterday I heard someone say, “it’s better than jail”. Referring to a single rom occupancy hotel in the Vancouver downtown east side. And I thought, does the person who will be living there think that it is better than prison or is that an assumption that we sometimes make…us who perhaps have never lived in prison nor a Downtown Eastisde Single Room Occupancy hotel. I think that it is important to start having conversations with people about what they like and don’t like about places, to understand their understandings of their own lives, the places that they live and the things that they do because I really don’t know…the same way they really don’t know about me and my life and the context of my experience. I feel judged and misunderstood sometimes by those I provide care for, by my work colleagues and peers, so I imagine that I am likely not the only one in this symbiotic relationship of health care delivery that thinks like this and feels this way. So how do we transcend that? How do we help to create and encourage a workplace of reflective practice? How do we get to an understanding that how we think about our job and the relationships that we have in our jobs influences how we do our job?
Peace,
Michelle D.