Hello. I'm Mary Jo Kreitzer, a professor in the School of Nursing and the founder and director of the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing at the University of Minnesota. If you or someone you love became a patient in the healthcare system, you'd want a nurse who goes beyond your diagnosis, vital signs, and admission history to find out who you are. A caregiver who knows you, your story, what matters to you. A nurse who can help you tap into your inner capacity to heal. You'd want to be in a space that enables you to connect with nature directly or through art, light, or imagery. And you'd want to be with a nursing staff that is attentive to noise and privacy. You'd want a nurse who makes sure that your care is coordinated, someone you feel connected to, and who can connect the dots around your care. And if you experience pain, nausea, anxiety or have difficulty sleeping, you would appreciate that your nurse could offer you aromatherapy, guided imagery, acupressure, or guide you through mind-body approaches and if needed, provide you with medications or other conventional treatments. Finally, you'd be well served to be cared for by nurses who invest in their own wellbeing. We know that it is difficult to give what you don't have. What I've described is integrative nursing, a way of being, doing, and knowing that is transforming patient care and restoring joy and integrity to the nursing profession. Nurses yearn to practice in this way. As we launch this course together, I invite you to reflect on the following questions. Why did you become a nurse? And does your current practice align with your original intentions? The goal of Integrative Nursing is to shape and inform and improve care across patient populations and clinical settings, and to restore meaning and joy to the practice of nursing. Carolyn Hayes, the president and executive director of the Greater Boston Nurses Collective talks about the importance of joy in the workplace and how Integrative Nursing contributes to both patient care and the meaning and joy that nurses find in their practice. >> I think that it's probably important to say, first of all, what is joy in our practice? And we actually have done some work looking at concept analysis and the difference between joy and happiness. And what we're trying to capture, if you will, is this idea that joy becomes a perpetual motion. And in the frame, in the context of Integrative Nursing, it does several things. In integrative nursing, it's actually a great way to explicate joy out of our practice. Taylean Dasia Dane has a great quote about where truth, beauty and goodness are found whether in moments of great love or in moments of despair. They end up rising and converging and they converge and rise around the greatest truths of beauty, goodness. And that is where nursing finds its nobility and its vocation. It's when nursing wants to be in that place where as a vocation what you bring meets with the greatest needs of society are. Explicating moments of joy is important for the patient. It's important that every moment counts. And when you have that mindset, which Integrative Nursing cause you to have, to say that every person is unique and valued and has the ability to self heal-- healing not being the same as cured. And when you put back together and put nurses in those moments, it ends up with a nurse experiences joy. So the reflective practice becomes the moment of joy for the nurse to be able to have had that connection to another human being. To have had that impact on a life, that is what we all want to do. That's what we're taught to do. And that's what we feel when when practicing nursing in an Integrative Nursing model. Nursing is nothing short of a privilege. It is a call to be with strangers in some of the most intense and intimate moments of their lives. And the privilege is that you get to be there and that you get to be part of it. And when you take the time to explicate that practice, to experience it whole person, healing, environments, you end up being part of an incredible system, and it self perpetuates. >> Many of the experts featured in this course also contributed to the Integrative Nursing text that I wrote with Mary Koithan. There's a video in this week's resources where I say more about the book's content and what motivated us to write it. For now, we have established that Integrative Nursing is a way of being, doing, and knowing that is transforming patient care and restoring joy and integrity to the nursing profession. The next video begins to more clearly define what Integrative Nursing is and why it is needed.
