The Progressive Agenda’s Blindness: Want Some Candy, Sweet Angel?
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The progressive left usually has a handle on treating people fairly, with tolerance, with accuracy, with respect and with evidence-based reporting. But there’s one glaring omission in the progressive agenda: the lack of support of professional nurses.
Not us! We love nurses. They are angels. They take care of all the stuff that the doctors leave behind. They are so good. Hey - my sister, mother, cousin, niece, aunt, best friend is a nurse, and I love her.
Here’s a sample:
At one point I remember someone commenting that the staff at Saint Johns had been fantastic and we really needed to do something to thank them, and the next thing I knew three huge boxes of confections from Sweet Lady Jane’s arrived for them with no note attached. I still don’t know who to thank for that, but it was exceptionally thoughtful. And finally, to my doctors, Armando Giuliano (who was told by a fellow practitioner, “if your Republican clientele falls off, you’ll know why”) and Jay Orringer (of whom Digby says, “that guy is deep”) — well, what can you say. They saved my life.
And there-in lies every stereotype of nurses and nursing: submissive, female, angelic, handmaiden, obedient, loving and caring woman. Intelligence and autonomy of practice are never mentioned.
What’s missing?
Reality.
Nurses, almost three million of them in the U.S., are educated beginning at the associate degree level through post-doctoral study. They provide professional nursing which aims at supporting patients to attain, regain, or maintain health or to achieve a peaceful death. They deliver care in the home, in schools, in communities, in healthcare organizations, in academia, and in research settings. They serve as officers in the military and in the national public health service.
Although most are women (about 94%), nursing is wide open to everyone who is committed to lifelong learning, to ethics in providing patient care, and to everyone who is committed to achieving health and providing for the common good.
Nurses are repressed, oppressed and fettered in delivering professional nursing care. Because the vast majority work as employees, they are constrained by employer policies and procedures that limit nursing via staffing decisions, replacing nurses with unlicensed personnel and with policies that do not allow nurses to dictate nursing.
Nurses are fettered in prescribing nursing care by insurers who exclude nursing care from covered services. They are fettered by physicians who do do have the power to prescribe nursing care and who fail to do that. Physicians are more than happy to steal recognition for excellent nursing care. But strip nurses from any patient care situation, and patients suffer.
Worse is that nurses are fettered by a willfully ignorant public that demands professional nursing but which does not recognize it as a full and autonomous profession. The public does not demand fair and healthy work conditions for nurses. It does not support professional nursing’s health agenda. It lumps nurses with all hospital “staff” and thereby doesn’t even care to know what nurses do, how they do it and what its importance is to patients.
It’s hazardous to your health to continue to think of nurses as angels of mercy, of being cute chicks in hot uniforms, of serving as taskmasters at the behest of physicians and of having no professional voice.
Nurses are the professionals who teach patients about their health problems. They are the professionals who assess, monitor and treat patients in every healthcare institution. They are the ones who monitor children’s growth, development and health in schools. They are the ones who are with you when you are born, and they are with you when you die. They are the ones who teach you to manage your medications, to change your dressings, to take care of your family members, who answer your questions, who are concerned with how your problems affect you, and who are doing their darnedest against all odds to get you well and to help you keep yourself that way.
And the progressive left wants to acknowledge them with Hallmark verses and candy?
It is past time to strip the cloak of invisibility from nursing and strip the blinders from the progressive left. The goals are the same. To ignore professional nursing is to do so at your peril - and that of the nation.
Professional nursing, empowered patients. Good health.