Thanks to recent feedback from a reader who has missed seeing posts on this blog, our blogging team has renewed our commitment to making this blog what it should be – a regular reminder to all of us of the urgency to bring the fundamental values of nursing to the center in all of nursing education!  So with this post, I am urging everyone who sees it to pass along the information about this blog to all of your colleagues, sign up to follow the blog, and to participate with us in creating a lively and inspiring community of nurse educators who are dedicated to manifesting nursing values!

Our current blogging team are all nurse educators who are all involved with the NurseManifest project. The project addresses all of the arenas where nursing’s core values are sorely needed – practice, education, research, policy and politics, administration – fundamentally anywhere there is, or needs to be, a nursing presence!  As educators, we are particularly sensitive to the need to sustain our focus on the fundamental values, focus, and perspective of the discipline in educating future generations of nursing.

We know that it is all too easy to lose sight of the focus of our own discipline in the face of many competing demands, and the fact that we work and live in contexts that require the participation and knowledge of providers from many other disciplines as well.  In some of these contexts the perspectives of other disciplines are necessarily at the forefront, but always, if a nurse is involved, we have the opportunity to bring a valuable and valued perspective to the situation.  We no longer participate simply to serve at the will of physicians or any other professional care-giver.  We cooperate, sometimes perform overlapping tasks, and collaborate with all who participate in any particular situation.  But in today’s healthcare environment, any situation where nursing values are not expressed is a situation bereft of an element of care that is less than whole.

In nursing education, our job is to bring that essential element of care to the forefront – to emphasize the ways in which nurses connect to the patient’s and family’s experience of their health condition.  When we teach about a health condition we of course include the facts about the condition and the modes of treatment that are in current use by other disciplinary groups with whom we interact. But always, we believe that our curricula must emphasize our own capabilities to heal, to teach, to encourage, to explain, to listen to the patient’s own perceptions and experiences, to advocate for their own needs, to notice even subtle signs of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, confusion, grief, hope, relief or joy – and to respond with our professional nursing capabilities to care with and for them.

So join us in sharing resources and ideas, in asking questions and participating in discussion that can inspire every nurse educator to reach for the best we can offer in our educational endeavors!  Most important, sign up to follow this blog, and when you receive a notice of a post, come back to offer your thoughts and ideas to make this a dynamic and vital resource!