nursingforsocialjustice

The COVID pandemic has been hard on all of us. It’s been especially challenging for the tens of thousands of nurses around the globe. As we get closer to the International Council of Nursing Congress. I am reflecting on what nursing means to me.

In my logical mind it is the profession of nursing that has the power to change everything. In my mind it is the discipline of nursing that has the power to blow up academia. First we dismantle this castle, we don’t just take it down to the studs, we take it apart and look at the pieces to really interrogate what they are made of, to see what these pieces were, and then, we build it again with different blueprints drawn by a collaboration of different people with different perspectives and standpoints.

Nursing is a profession built on ideas of empathy, care, compassion, collaboration, seeing the person for who they are. For the last 100 years we have been, in many ways, bound by structures that seemingly clip our wings to control us. But, I do not think it has to be so. It does not make sense to me that every year we have to fight, beg, try and get people on board with the idea that healthcare is a human right and that social determinants of health are real.

It does not make any sense to me that day after day, year after year, in a system that is saturated with women who are working in this nursing profession, we are not constantly breaking through barriers with the power that we have. It just does not compute that in 2021 we aren’t leading change in the system. It does not make any sense that studying how the healthcare system was built, studying these structures, studying our place in it, hasn’t made the system different in terms of our place in academia and science…or has it? How are physicians and other academics still so firmly at the healm of this ship so much so that it feels like asking for permission for a nurse to engage in research? Like a child begging to sit at the adult table at holiday dinner time.

And I’m just too naive to see that we are wanting to pounce? Michelle, you Mid-Life Crisis is showing.

You tell me.

Love,

Michelle D.