Casey-Fink

So you know how I'm now the teacher of a nice little group of 6 new graduate nurse interns? I have them in "class" 2 or 3 days a week, and they're out seeing patients with their very own preceptor the rest of the time. We're (=I'm) going to be tracking a variety of outcome measures for the program, and today I gave them the Casey-Fink Graduate Nurse Experience survey. (Yeah, I know, whatever--but it's quite well validated!) And it turned out that they're a half-dozen happy little clams, those new grads of mine. I'm so pleased. They love their preceptors and feel all supported and glad they chose to go into home care and stuff. And it so happened that we had our class session on "Interpersonal Issues in the Workplace" today, and when I mentioned in part of my preamble the old saw that "nurses eat their young," (gruesome saying, isn't it?), most of them said they had experienced that kind of thing (i.e., hostility from experienced nurses) as nursing students during their clinical experiences in the hospital, but not one of them has experienced a single speck of it at Our Home Care Agency.

So my heart is full, and my face is all beam-y. I'm just so, so pleased.

You know, quite near the root of the reason I went into nursing originally, there is the experience that I had of a decade of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome during my early 20s-early 30s. The few times that I had an interaction with a really human, empathetic health professional during that time were tremendously important to me. Alongside those experiences were the less positive ones (though thankfully nobody ever went so far as to tell me it was all in my head, or some of the other things that many people with CFS have heard). The combination of the two made me want to do it right, to give the kind of health care that I wanted to get. It somehow made it feel like it could make up the difference, that in doing for others, I'd be doing for myself. It doesn't make a whole lot of rational sense, I admit, but for some reason the emotional calculus is very solid in my head.

And that's similar to how I feel about this program. I want to make it right for a little group of new nurses--to have their entry into the profession be welcoming, well supported, with reasonable and realistic expectations and a thoughtful, stepwise initiation to the necessary skills and knowledge. Nursing is both important and (if you do it right) incredibly complex. It seems worth, to me, the very best introduction you can provide. So how cool is it that I get to make that happen? That it's actually working?

Um, okay, I'll tell you. It's cool. It's very, very cool.