A Tribute to Nurses Coast to Coast

April 25, 2005

Many Points on the Compass of Care

For this special Nurses Week issue, we are featuring you, the nurses of America. You practice in all kinds of roles in diverse settings preventing disease and injury, teaching patients and families, and caring for the sick and dying. You probe the depth of the human condition — the strength and suffering of the body, mind, heart, and spirit.

Your understanding of science and your critical-thinking skills fuel your work, but you also know the power of human touch, a sympathetic ear, and an encouraging word. Most of all, you embody the American spirit of giving and caring at its finest. You shine in every corner of our country and our world — caring for children in the nation’s capital and the elderly in San Francisco. You practice in the EDs of Philly and the ORs of Minnesota. You conduct research in Atlanta and teach the next generation of nurses in Boston. And, you help save lives in the battlefields of far-flung lands. This is your career and your calling. As a nation, we’re grateful you answered that call.

Pediatric nursing is as diverse as the views represented in our nation’s Capitol. Peds nurses can encounter jaundiced newborns, toddlers with croup, and teenagers with meningitis all in a single day. Medical interventions may vary from patient to patient, but one thing remains the same when it comes to pediatric nursing—nurses like Jean Farley, RN, of HSC Pediatric Center in Washington, D.C., always provide the much-needed compassion and comfort sick children and worried parents so desperately need.

Nurses are a fundamental component of direct trauma care and the operation of trauma centers — the hospitals specially designated to care for the most critically ill patients. Trauma nurses Maureen Frye, RN (left); Maureen Small, RN; and Dean Nuss, RN, of Abington Memorial Hospital in Abington, Pa., are specially trained to manage patients’ physical conditions and emotional stress. These nurses must think and act quickly, whether tending to a single patient or managing mass casualties from a disaster scene.

“It was a life-long dream to work for the Centers for Disease Control [in Atlanta],” says Capt. Joyce Goff, RN, BSN, MEd, MHL, a health education specialist in the National Immunization Program. “It is the utopia of a career. We help the world identify disease and do various things to control and prevent diseases. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?”

Programs to increase the interest in nursing as a career have been so successful that the other shortage — nursing faculty — is causing students to be turned away at some schools. At Regis College, Weston, Mass., Antoinette Hays, RN, PhD, is doing her part to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Nursing has such a deep impact on patients’ lives that RNs become forever entwined in the hearts and minds of those receiving nursing care. But touching someone’s life in a special way is not limited to nurses alone. Patients often affect nurses in equally profound ways as Stacey Ruby, RN (left), and her twin Tracey Greenwood, RN, discovered while caring for 2-year-old conjoined twins at Medical City at Dallas Hospital.

“I know we’re not supposed to become attached to our patients,” said Janet Doggett, RN, another member of Medical City’s nursing team, “but these little guys wrap their fists around your heart and they don’t let go.”

From Gettysburg to Iwo Jima, from Vietnam to Iraq, American health care professionals have answered the call to serve during wartime. Weaponry and tactics change, but war’s effects are still devastating. The military relies on nurses to give competent care in stressful environments. When not on military duty, Marine Staff Sgt. Charles Peworski, RN, works as an RN house supervisor at Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, Ariz.

“Normally as a nurse at the bedside, you do your very best to make all the clinical decisions you can make to keep the patient safe until you absolutely have to call the physician,” says Chris Tanner, RN, an eICU nurse at Health First’s Hospitals in Florida. “What the eICU is doing is allowing the nurse to access a physician and another critical care nurse in the same instant they see a change in the patient. What that does is promote crisis prevention, rather than crisis intervention. If we can catch changes early and intervene immediately, we save lives, and that’s what the eICU does.”

“When we enter patients’ homes, we put our cultural values behind and start with a blank slate,” says Najah Bazzy, RN, BSN, director of Transcultural Care Services and the Human Diversity Home Health Care Program of Home Health Care Partners Inc., (HCP), Southfield, Mich. Bazzy’s transcultural program focuses on culture-specific, community-based care. She instructs her staff to ask patients upfront how they want to be cared for. Nurses draw on patients’ answers and put Leininger’s theory to work by either preserving culture-related health behaviors or negotiating around and reorganizing them.

Surgery is a precise practice that requires all team members to be in perfect step with each other. RN first assistants like Mary Weis, RN (pictured), of CentraCare Clinic in St. Cloud, Minn., are often there in the OR keeping time alongside the rest of the OR team. Because she works side by side with surgeons, Giselle Harris, RNFA, MSN, CNOR, likens her role to that of a dancer. “There is a certain way to hold your arms and your hands while assisting, which is a lot like learning to position yourself during a dance,” she says.

New parents often have many questions about how to care for their new infants. Nurses like Charlotte Johnson, RN, of John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County in Chicago, provide support and encouragement to parents in many ways. They answer questions and offer information to help parents make decisions about their children’s health.

Long-term care nurses like Pat Thornton, RN, of On Lok Senior Health Services in San Francisco, form a strong bond with their older patients. While providing care that reflects patients’ individual cognitive and physical stages, nurses learn about their patients’ unique life experiences like living through WWII; life during the Great Depression; and their views on the past, present, and future of this country.

Most patients who are hospitalized in the ICU feel vulnerable and afraid. Like any critical care nurse, Linda Scharp, RN, who practices at St. Francis Hospital, Roslyn, N.Y., is there to give an encouraging word or a reassuring touch. Undaunted by complex technology, these nurses gracefully meld high-tech with high-touch to heal patients’ bodies and minds.