I was drawn to this book because I love the word “rhythm”. In fact, with my free-spirited personality (Enneagram 4 – if you’re into that), I use the word rhythm instead of the word routine because it sounds like so much more fun: dancing instead of creating order.
I’ve just started and I’m already captured by a couple of quotes – particularly ones about choices.
It’s way easier to play the victim than to own the impact of our choices.
But I do want to live an uncommon life. So it’s time to intentionally be the drummer – the rhythm maker – of my own life. That way, no matter how the song turns out – good, bad, or ugly – it is still very much my own.
If you feel like you’re dried up and not able to shine anymore, it may not have anything to do with your work environment or even your abilities. You may simply be in need of a new thing….
Perhaps take this Sunday afternoon to do some soul searching (between March Madness games, of course 😂).
New may not look like taking a career break to realign life and values like I have chosen to do. But if you’re feeling dry, reconnecting with your own soul and your Maker might be well worth the time investment.
Over 30 years ago, as a brand-new graduate nurse, I was starry-eyed and ready to change the world – one patient’s life at a time.
Over time, I discovered that my passion to make a difference paired with my ability to communicate and connect with others could work well in other avenues of healthcare such as quality, patient safety, and regulatory.
I wanted to facilitate processes that made it as easy as possible for every healthcare professional to do the right thing for every single patient every single time.
However, sometimes the best intentions may backfire and may even make it more difficult for the patient care frontline to do their jobs – particularly if initiatives outlive the problem they were designed to solve.
Let me explain, pre-pandemic there were more nurses and more time for them to participate in performance improvement projects and influence the practice changes that impacted their every day. Checklists and audits created healthy reminders of steps toward best evidenced-based practice.
But then the whole world, and in particular our healthcare world, was changed by that invisible-to-the-naked-eye enemy. COVID-19. We were already on shaky ground with new nurses not being educated quickly enough to replace retiring ones and high rates of burnout during the best of times. But now as many as 1 in 5 fulltime healthcare professionals are leaving those roles. Suicide rates among healthcare professionals – which were never low – are now higher than ever.
So, actions like asking a charge nurse to complete daily audits or pulling a nurse manager into multiple performance improvement actives may have worked a few years ago. But asking those same things now when charge nurses and managers are often pulled into staffing with full patient loads doesn’t feel like supporting them anymore.
I absolutely know that processes in healthcare need to be checked and audited. But I also know that throwing one more thing on already stretched – sometimes traumatized even – healthcare team members can be that “final straw” that causes them to call it quits.
For me, personally, I am coming full circle in my career and actually taking a career break in order to regroup and find ways to wear scrubs more and carry “corrective clipboards” less. (Plus, this break coincides will with my taking some long overdue time for some healing and processing of a couple strong blows that have hit my personal life hard in recent years). I know not everyone has the ability to do this, but I believe there are some things everyone in healthcare leadership can easily do to be a blessing-not-a-burden, asset-not-an-a$$-kicker, supporter-not-a-destroyer, and an encourager-not-an-enforcer. (You get the idea).
Wear scrubs
Sometimes it’s as simple as losing the polyester power suit or dress and being a little more relatable
Jump in and do something tangible for them!
You may be like me and it’s been a minute since your clinical days. It may not be safe for you to take a whole load of patients. But if you’re more on the administrative side of health care these days, even taken 10-15 minutes out of your day to answer phones or call lights or calm a confused patients could make the difference and make you much easier to listen to when you give them correction or advice.
Uplift more than you correct.
Remember when all the leadership gurus were touting the importance of sandwiching correction or any other information that may weigh someone down between positive/uplifting comments? Well, that is more important than ever!
Just being present and listening can mean more than you ever know. Now more than ever, healthcare professionals may feel warn and torn – like a ragamuffin. If they see your heart, time, and intention – you may be just the oasis a weary soul needs.
It’s almost-but-not-quite the day Allen comes to mow our lawn. So it’s a bit of a jungle out there with clovers and other weeds vying for their place in our front yard along with the grass.
But, upon looking out the front windows, I was treated to a sight I may have missed had our lawn been perfectly manicured….
I looked out to see a whole menagerie of urban wildlife, from a mother and baby bunny to a whole variety of birds, happily playing our front yard.
It reminded me of that scene from Disney’s old Snow White film where all the furry forest creatures are keeping Snow White company as she happily sings in the woods.
I realized…. all of the weeds and tall grass were actually attracting the amazing wildlife I was enjoying. I couldn’t help but wondering if in all of our striving for perfection, we miss – or even destroy – the beauty around us.
That is one reason I’ve titled this blog (and future book), Ragamuffin Oasis. Perhaps the true places of oasis (rest, refreshing, and thriving) are not the well manicured facades that consumerism and even religion tell us we need.
Perhaps only in admitting we are human and embracing are scruffier, imperfect, ragamuffin selves can we every be truly free.
“Prayer is how our souls breathe.” – Sarah Kroger (from the “Own Your Belovedness” reading plan on the free YouVersion Bible App). “Belovedness” is also a beautiful song that you can hear by clicking here: https://youtu.be/K_6PcNBUj4c
Those of us who have been in the healthcare field for more than a minute cannot deny that the system is broken. Our health care organizations and professionals are excellent and compassionate but at risk of being set up for failure by the larger broken system (or, more accurately, non-system) that exists across our nation.
I can’t help but believe that the entire nursing profession is going through collective survivor’s syndrome right now as we watch a colleague facing prison time for a medication error.
Many of us in the field of Healthcare Quality have worked so hard to encouraging speaking up when things go wrong in healthcare. But I believe this verdict is not just tragic for the individual nurse involved, but could possibly cripple much of the forward motion we’ve made in building transparent cultures of patient safety within hospitals over the past decade.
Walter Cronkite made this statement decades ago, long before COVID-19, the hyper-politicization of healthcare, supply crises, and staffing shortages like we’ve never seen before. So… the truth of these words rings even more loudly today.
However, I believe the current tipping point of my industry is birthing the #innovative “out of the box” thinking so necessary for much needed positive and lasting #change.
And, by “out of the box”, I truly mean out of big boxy hospital buildings and through screens into homes, thanks to innovative uses of #telemedicine.
As lauded at the beginning of the pandemic, healthcare professionals truly are amazing, caring superheroes. However, even the greatest superheroes cannot sustain changes in a broken system.
Praying that all of these crises will facilitate the mending of our country’s healthcare system rather than accelerating its implosion.
Ragamuffin Oasis: Finding Our Places to Just Be 