Personal Narrative: My Interview With Registered Nurse

I met Wanda Waters just about a month ago, while I was furthering my career and taking classes for my State Tested Nurse Aid (STNA) certification. Although she is a Registered Nurse, she was the teacher for this class. I learned a lot about her professional opinions through this class, where she taught me the things I needed to know to be a successful STNA. Through my interview with her I learned even more about her professional views that I can apply to my practice as both an STNA and Registered Nurse. Ms. Waters has worked in the medical industry for over ten years in different situations. She has worked in many nursing homes, a few hospitals, and now works in a home care agency based out of Akron, Ohio. She worked through college at Stark …show more content…
Compassion in nursing is a difficult thing to define but it means seeing situations from the patient’s perspective and having empathy when providing care. “As conceptualized by Stamm, a sustainable ProQOL is achieved by maintaining a healthy balance between the positive and negative aspects of caring.”(Saco, 2015). This is a tough balance to strike between caring to much and caring too little and it is something I have been very curious about in my studies as a nurse. I asked Ms. Waters to talk to me about compassion in nursing and also specifically to talk about how compassion related to her career. “Compassion in nursing is rarer than you would expect,” Ms. Waters confided honestly. Many people who come into the nursing career don’t have a lot of compassion to begin with and aren’t able to care for the patient’s needs. Others that act too compassionately get burnout and can’t care for their patients effectively either. It’s a balance that must be drawn and that is different for every individual. “Despite decades of research, poor nurse staffing and work environments, high nursing workload, and burnout continue to contribute to nurses’ dissatisfaction” and lack of compassion in their field (Kelly, Spencer, 2015). Ms. Waters says that in her career specifically, compassion has played an important role. She considers herself to be a compassionate person and had to learn to use …show more content…
Getting inside of their minds can be a life changing experience. When I asked Ms. Waters if there were any instances that changed her ideas of nursing because of an interaction with a patient, she remembered one scenario. “The loss of one of my first patients really affected the way I see my patients,” said Ms. Waters. Although she had always been compassionate with her patients, losing her first one made her see all of her patients in a different light. She was working in a nursing home when she lost her first patient, and it was someone she had been caring for regularly for a couple of months. She was alone on the floor when it happened, and it was sudden although not totally unexpected as the patient was well into her nineties. She had found the patient and had to call in other nurses to help determine whether she was gone or not. The patient’s husband was in the room when it happened which made the whole experience even more heartbreaking. The patient who had passed away had been a difficult one to care for. She had been very pleasant, but she had a lot of difficulties and was totally dependent on nursing staff for her activities of daily living. Her death taught Ms. Waters that you have to make the most of the time you have with your patients. Sometimes the relationship between a patient and a nurse is terminated because of death and other times the person is well and leaving the