We know this don’t we? We work with other nurses and know that it doesn’t matter whether we trained together side by side, worked for years together, or whether we trained at the opposite ends of the earth - no two nurses are alike…am I correct?
We get a wonderful education whether this was from the apprenticeship or the degree model, at graduation, we know we are qualified and competent to practice as a nurse or midwife. That’s where the similarity ends. From that point onwards we direct our professional careers by chance or by direction to a place, a goal, a vision of wherever we want to be. We acquire skills competencies, abilities, gain experience and shape the nurse or midwife we hope to become. It is also very rare that a nurse or midwife remains with their primary qualification. They strive to learn more, climb higher, gain more qualifications and experience and take the opportunities that may not have been available earlier in their lives.
But a big part of who they become and what they bring to the profession is shaped by their life experiences and the fulfilment or hardship in their own lives. No nurse or midwife chooses the professions to make money! We invest all of ourselves in the work we do. We have to, in order to be authentic and present for our patients and women. We bring our baggage, our personal lives, our bills, our troubles, our personal worries and the rest, to the door of the unit we work in, we drop those bags, we push through the doors and leave it all at the door. We enter the world of “OTHER” and do what we call our “life’s work” for the 8 or 12 hour shift or longer.
We don’t look back at those bags for this time and we work for the benefit of those in our care for the duration of time we need to be there. When the shift is over, we return to those same doors and pick up our bags and return to our lives – it’s as simple as that. Now, I for one have been blessed by this privilege within my professional life, especially when listening to friends talk about their work and life issues and how they cannot be separated. So on some level, at some of the worst times of my life, my work has been a respite for thoughts if not body.
Travelling on the different paths within nursing or midwifery further emphasises how one nurse or midwife cannot be replaced by another. A nurse is not a nurse and a midwife is not a midwife, to be placed in a situation to fill a deficit of some kind within the profession or some other profession. We see this during the pandemic when many nurses had to gain skills when moved to different areas. This was both thrilling and frightening and not everyone enjoyed the process. This has also been seen recently in the deficit of Public Health Nurses in the Dublin/Wicklow/Kildare areas for the screening of children at 7-11 months. I spoke on the radio last week about this issue and was able to share that a nurse is not a nurse, in that you just cannot replace a PHN with a nurse, as they are highly skilled nurses in this area, just as nurses cannot walk into the ICU unit and be expected to know what to do.
It boils down to one thing – people do not know what we do until they need us – whether its pregnant women who call us nurses until they understand that midwives are different. Or whether it’s Public Health Nurses who care for people in the community from birth to death and in between, to the renal dialysis nurse who cannot be replaced by ‘any’ nurse. You would not expect a GP to replace a cardiac surgeon would you?
But nobody knows this about nurses and midwives because nobody asks us to speak about what we do. If they ask us to speak on our profession, we may have to go through that many layers of managerial approval and communication departments in tour workplace, that the issue has passed and been forgotten. This does not happen for the medical profession who have had more air time in the past 2 years making them household names now! Part of this is the medias fault for taking the easy way out of asking a medic about nursing and midwifery rather than asking the professions themselves. I would also say that much of this responsibility lies at our own doorstep. We are nurses and midwives and may be classified as fruit but like apples and oranges we are different and have different functions and purposes.
“Just sayin….”
It was with great sadness that I heard today about the death of the young midwife, Shauna Mc Grath, on her way home from a night shift in Waterford maternity unit. My thoughts and prayers go out to her parents, family, friends and colleagues. Such lovely sentiments were expressed on social media from those that knew her and expressed the loss that would be felt in the profession. It is truly a great loss for the profession, for a young midwife with a great ‘trade’ to be lost in this way because of an occupational hazard. It was really only when non-professionals raised the issue with me that I thought of what they were saying and tried to process it.
Their issue was why would a highly educated young person expose themselves to the gruelling lifestyle of nursing or midwifery and the abnormal requirements of the job that is nightshifts, for a poor wage and the risk of death. Their point was that you would be better off in a higher paid job, working 9-5pm, where your wage would be better and the risks to your life reduced. I didn’t know what to say…..the love of the profession and what you can do to help others didn’t seem an appropriate answer at that moment. I’m sure I can discuss this another time with you and rationalise the choices of those that choose to help others for a poor wage.
But for the moment, let’s think of Shauna and hope that she will reign in Heaven. RIP