You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 14th, 2008.
Nursing schools love to champion magnet status and what it takes to achieve it. Nursing councils are a big part of that process. I started working as a staff nurse late January, and up to now I hadn’t heard anything of them. It’s something that I expected to be passionate about while still in school, but the steep learning curve I found myself on immediately after graduating (still there) left me with one immediate focus (don’t kill anyone) that took my eyes off the big picture. I’m finally at a place where I can stop ever-so-briefly and look around.
The other day I noticed a sign posted in our unit with various councils and the nurses making up our unit’s councils. I found my name under a quality council and then , at the very bottom and very alone, on the skin council. Right. (I did learn that I was merely a unit representative to a hospital-wide council vs. a member of a unit council.)
A couple of days later I got a flyer for a skin council meeting. I showed up today to find two other nurses present (out of how many, I don’t know). It lasted 10 minutes, and we went over the last skin survey results. (Our hospital had 1% pressure ulcers present, most of which were there on admission. Not bad.) I mentioned that I was definitely going to need some type of crash course in skin care, particularly regarding the different dressings available and which was better when. The skin nurse said that she could put together some notebooks for each unit.
The quality council meets sometime next week. I don’t know what to expect, but I do know that I want to deepen my involvement in nursing councils. This is the kind of thing that excited me in school. However long I end up working at this hospital, I want to be sure that I leave my mark – for the better.
