Mercy Hospital School of Nursing - Mercium Yearbook (Bay City, MI)

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:ll nz iuzgrx received three-eighths of a grain of morphine, makes the nurse omit the morning bath and let her sleep, instead of forcibly shaking her awake again. This attitude of mind is illustrated by the story of the private duty nurse who was called into an isolated lllinois farmhouse in the dead of the winter to a scarlet fever case. The child patient was apparently dying of exhaustion, because she could not sleep. The mucous membrane of nose and throat had become so badly swollen so that whenever she fell asleep the dried tongue stopped the childls breathing and she woke again. The nurse, watching the child, discovered the difliculty. Wrapped in a blanket, in an unheated bedroom in zero weather, she sat all night long at the bedside with a glass of water and a medicine dropper, letting fall drop after drop of water on the child's swollen tongue, so that the child slept peacefully all night through. That was more than kindness or sympathy. It called for endurance, for insight into what was wrong, and for ingenuity as to the remedy. This type of mind is probably what nurses and doctors mean when they speak of Hthe art of nursingf' It was described recently as characteristic of tithe nurse who knows what to doe- when. Finally, perhaps the most interesting and dramatic of the qualities which make for good nursing is a kind of acute perception which gives to some nurses what seems to the outsider an uncanny ability to know what is happening to the patient. It is sometimes spoken of as Nintuitionf' or the nurseis usixth sense.,7 It seems to be acquired by especially intelligent nurses, as a result of long hours of concentrated highly keyed attention to patients. These particular nurses become sensitive to extremely slight stimuli, such as scarcely perceptible changes in the color of a patient's skin, or the odor of the room, or the angle his hand makes with his wrist. It is this extreme responsiveness in slight stimuli which makes possible this story of a ward supervisor in a maternity hospital who said: live sort of got so l recog- nize patients who are going to need watching. There was one woman-for example- l had finished my rounds and was going off duty, but l couldn't get her off my mind. l had been in so see her and she seemed all right, but l had a hunch she wasn't. So l went back for another look. And believe me, one look was enough! l simply dove under the bed clothes and grabbed herl It was a postpartum hemorrhagefi Most good nurses would have recognized such a hemorrhage after it was well started. but only the exceptional nurse, peculiarly sensitive to extremely slight stimuli, would recognize it at its onset. Of these six characteristics, only manual skill is usually directly aimed for in training, and yet it is perhaps the least important of the series. The others are acquired in varying degrees by the more intelligent and experienced nurses. E. J. Persons, M. D. I -WI s. 1't't ' A - ,Q , . ' - ... ... l62l

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, v I ,lip Good Nursing Good nursing has at least six important characteristics. Simplest to teach and to understand is the characteristic of manual skill. The good nurse has learned how to move quietly and gently, how to make beds, and apply bandages, and do many other things, some of which call for nice muscular co-ordination. , When a doctor wants a nurse who knows her business and her follow ordersf' he probably means one who has learned good methods for doing things. and has practiced them so much that they are matters of habit, and she can do them whenever needed, and invariably well. It is this physical part of nursing which lends itself most readily to job analysis, and which is probably in the minds of most people when they talk of basic nursing which every nurse must learn. The other five characteristics of good nursing are a little easy to describe. lmport- ant among them is what the Spaniards call the gift of people and what, for want of a better word, we can call uleadershipf' It is what enables the nurse to lead her patients to believe in the doctor and to take the doctor's orders seriously. It makes her able to teach the patient not only what the doctor wants him to do, but why. It enables her to get the patient to eat when he is not hungry. It is a characteristic born in or acquired by successful politicians, and salesmen, and women of hcharmfi and it is particularly valuable in the nurse. It is probably what the doctor means when he speaks of the nurse who 'fknows how to handle people. Another quality essential to good nursing is persistence. lt is the quality which, at the scene of disaster, keeps the Red Cross nurse on duty 50, 60, 70 hours at a stretch. It is what keeps doctors and nurses at the bedside, fighting desperately to save the patient who they know cannot be saved-working to perform a miracle. It is what the athlete calls uthe ability to take punishment. The deep underlying respect and affection between the medical and nursing professions, which is so impressive to the outsider, rests upon the mutual recognition that nurses and doctors know how to fight. They carry on. A fourth characteristic of good nursing is the knowledge of what it is all about. The good nurse is the experienced nurse. She has seen, cared for and thought about many different sorts of people, with many different sorts of trouble. She has read books and talked with doctors and other nurses. She has a broad background of information and practice. The superintendent of a famous metropolitan hospital, handling a wide variety of cases, recently remarked: L'There is an enormous differ- ence between the two-year and the three-year nurse, and the superiority of the three- year product results not from the extra classes she may have had, but from the additional twelve months of responsible and intensive contact with sick people. She is permeated with her subject. The fifth characteristic is kindness but of a sort which is extremely rare because it is kindness dominated by intelligence. It is a characteristic peculiar to good nurses that keeps in mind the patientis physical and mental well being. It is the attitude of mind which, when her postoperative patient has just dropped asleep after having ltllf. E613

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