#28 Is this Really a Book for Nurses?
Amazon #1 New Release in Nurse & Patient Communications
Yes.
All Nurses, Nurse Practitioners and Nurse Midwives will benefit from the important message that I share in my new book. Somewhere along the way, nurses who entered one of the most noble and respected professions, find themselves knee-deep in interactions with patients who leave them frustrated, disappointed and defeated. Instead of respectful compliance and gratitude, nurses find themselves disregarded, disrespected and unappreciated. They see some of their traveling colleagues offered much more money than the people who have stayed loyal and slogged through the worst of a global pandemic.
The negative feelings that nurses’ have towards some difficult patients lead to exhaustion, cynicism. and feelings of burnout. The overload of sick covid patients stressed nurses greatly. Then when offered a life-saving vaccination, many of our fellow citizens thought it was too risky or unnecessary. Many of those folks have ended up on ventilators, suffering long Covid symptoms, or dead. While the nurses were working so hard to fight the virus, they often felt that some of their patients were actually fighting against them.
Drawing by Victor Creceanu
Since we can’t change other people or send them elsewhere, the only thing we can do is to change how we think about our difficult patients. It sounds a little like magical thinking but it most certainly is not. By understanding them, and understanding yourself as a nurse, you can have a much more satisfying experience. Sometimes people will leave against medical advice and sometimes people will die. That is an unavoidable part of the human experience. What you think about them and what you think about you matters. Thinking with more intention will change your experience and your results.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
The relationships that nurses have with their patients and the patients’ family are complex. They can’t be summed up or generalized in a short book like the one that I have written. However, the more nurses understand and become aware of the thoughts and feelings of all their patients, they can pause in those moments of hot anger and frustration. They can remember to show up the way they want to: with compassion, grace, and professionalism. It’s actually something that you have to practice to get good at.
I dedicated the book to the memory of my dear friend and college roommate, Mary Harris Edmonds, BSN. We met when we were first year students at the University of Virginia. I came there from central New Jersey and she came from Giles County in rural Southwestern Virginia. Our life experiences could not have originated from two more different places. She wanted to be a nurse and I wanted to be a physician. I heard many tales of writing lengthy care plans and long hours at her clinical rotations. For Mary, getting “capped” on commencement day in 1981 was surely the proudest day of her life. She went on to become credentialed as a critical care nurse.
Mary Harris Edmonds from Legacy.com
While she was working in the ED in Richmond, she met a tall and handsome nurse named Bob. Those two got married and had a beautiful family with three lively girls. Mary served her community for many years as a nurse in the critical care unit. When Mary died from cancer in 2018, her family and friends were heartbroken. Losing Mary forced me to look hard at my own life. Even though I had spent over thirty years practicing emergency medicine, there was a lot more I wanted to do and that included writing a book to share with our colleagues. Some exceptionally compassionate people like Mary, never meet a difficult patient. The rest of us, need some help.
The book can be found at https://shop.physicianleaders.org/collections/books/products/changing-how-we-think-about-difficult-patients-a-guide-for-physicians-and-healthcare-professionals
and here:
One emergency medicine resident wrote this message to me this week:
I’ve just finished reading your book, and I enjoyed it so much that I found myself trying to stretch it out. I rationed out a chapter each morning before my shifts in the Emergency Department, and I may have to read from them, and in them, again. Busy New York City Emergency Departments are hard, as I’m sure you know, and your book had a very effective blend of empathy, pragmatism and empowerment that I hope will shape my view of patients and of myself as a doctor for the rest of my career.
So yes, nurses, this is an important book for you to read. For those of you who like to listen, an audio version will be available in several months. (Sorry, you will not be hearing my sweet Jersey accent. We are having a professional actor read the book.) I have been very pleased at the responses to the book and I hope that you will find the message to be just the one that you need to hear, beautiful nurses, my friends and colleagues.
