Interview with a Nurse
...the whole person. In hospitals, Western medicine and holistic medicine are being used together, where both the patient’s body and mind are treated together, instead of the illness alone. A nurse also fights for the rights of each patient and holds their hand when they are scared or sad. Nurse’s days are anything but typical and they tend to be very unpredictable. They wake up every morning and they do not know what they are in for that day or night. Leadership, management, and communication skills are essential for nurses. Nurses use leadership skills when they have to lead physicians and co-workers. In Primary Nursing, where nurses are responsible for their own patients, they need to be vocal and be able to delegate and oversee things. Nurses must have good management skills and be able to manage their time well, and they need to know how to approach people about certain issues. Nurses also need to be capable of setting friendships aside and balancing things out. Communication skills are also very important for nurses because they must be able to spell out what they want to say to patients and their families in a way that they can easily understand. Communications skills also involve listening, reflecting back on what they have heard, building patient and co-worker trust, managing conflict in the workplace, and managing difficult patients. One aspect of professional nature that the nurse finds interesting and important for nursing is research participation. She enjoys researching and reading articles in magazines, newspapers, and online about important health issues. She told me that it is important for nurses to keep themselves up to date on the most recent medical findings and issues because nursing involves all of them. I hope that as a nurse, I can help other people become more aware of any health issues before it is too late to prevent or fix some of them. During the interview, I asked the nurse what her favorite thing about being a nurse is and she said that it is seeing her patient’s health improving, and seeing them leave the hospital. Years later, some of her patients return to thank her for what she did for them. She told me that the most important thing she has learned from being nurse is to have a lot of empathy and compassion for the different types of people that you meet because they depend on you to help them when they are most vulnerable. After completing the interview, I feel that I have a better understanding of what a nurse really is and what a nurse really does. I was able to talk to her about some of her daily tasks and roles, such as checking vit...