Why are Nurses the Most Trusted Profession? Your Responses!

Michelle: Good afternoon, guys. I wanted to do a quick little episode. A few weeks ago on Instagram, I posted that nurses have been the most trusted profession for 22 years running, and that's according to Gallup. And I wanted to know from you, why do we get this unique distinction? My perfect podcast episode would have been you guys sending me a text message through my platform. I have a wonderful platform. It's called Buzzsprout. And you have the ability to send a text message there. And then on my website, conversingnursepodcast.com, there's a little red tab on the right-hand side that says, "Send me a message" and you can record your voice message. And then I was going to play it for a podcast episode, but you guys are all microphone-shy shy and that's totally fine. But I got a lot of responses in the actual post itself, so I was just going to go through and discuss some of these and I'm going to call out the people that replied with their Instagram handle. 
So the first one is actually going to be my guest coming up here in the next few weeks. And this @coachsheena.johnson. Sheena said, "We are compassionate and we love seeing our patients recover and go home to their families." Yes, absolutely, Sheena, I think that is one of the most enjoyable aspects of being a nurse, to know that you have been a part of healing someone. I mean, that's why we do it, right? We do it so that we can see those success stories and we can see those people come in and be in their time of need, and we can meet them where they are. And with our interventions, with our care, with our critical thinking, we can help them to heal and hopefully help them prevent coming back to the hospital for the first place. Because for a lot of our patients, they're regulars, right? They come back in a lot. So I absolutely agree with Sheena and thank you, Sheena, for responding.
The next comment is from @yourrnjourney. And this person said, "Nurses are the most trusted profession because we are patient advocates and we are the ones linking all the different aspects of care together for the benefit of the whole person."  And I absolutely love this response, first of all, because it's 100% true. We are the patient advocates. We are speaking for them in their time of need. We are speaking for them when they do not have health literacy. And I think that's so important when you're in need, to have somebody who understands you and who can speak for you. And @yourrnjourney said, "We are the ones linking all the different aspects of care together for the benefit of the whole person." I'm hearing this more and more in nursing, that there's an approach to holistic nursing. So we don't just fix things. You know, people come in with a cut, and we don't just put a band aid on it, right? We are always assessing, we are talking. We are asking them about, you know, what's going on at home or just different aspects of their life, and we can get a bigger picture and a bigger picture of their needs and a bigger picture of just who they are as a person. And I really love that nursing is moving towards a more holistic approach. Some of you might say nursing has been using a holistic approach, but I would disagree. I feel like we compartmentalize a lot in nursing and in medicine, in healthcare in general. So I am very happy that we are seeing more holistic nursing and learning to look at the patient as not just a patient, not just somebody with a cut or an incision or a bruise or whatever it is, a disease, but somebody has as a whole person who has a family, who has hopes and dreams and. Yeah, I like where that's going. Thank you for that response. 
@honestlyleslie said, "Nurses are the most trusted profession because when no one else will listen, we do." And again, I agree. You guys are all spot on. When no one else will listen, we do. I think that's one of our superpowers. We have a lot of superpowers as nurses, and I've talked about a lot of them here on this program and in my Instagram posts, but we do. It's just a reality. We listen, and we don't just hear the words that they say. We listen between the words, right? So we can get feelings for things. We can get gut instincts, gut feelings. Somebody might say, this would happen to me a lot when I was nursing in the NICU and part of my job was a lactation specialist, and I got to meet with the moms every day of the premature babies. I learned really quickly to not say, "How are things going?" Because somebody who doesn't really want to talk about it, what are they going to say? They're going to say, "Oh, fine." Or, "How are you?" "Oh, I'm fine. Yeah, everything's fine." But their life is really a dumpster fire, right? So I started saying, "Tell me about what's been going on since I saw you last." And it opened up a whole new conversation because it helped them be vulnerable so that they could really express how they felt. Here's what I would hear: "Since I last saw you, which was on Friday, and now it's Monday. I had to take one of my kids to a soccer game. My four year old fell down and cut his chin, and we had to come to the emergency room. You know, I haven't been able to pump as often as I had been because of just my life in general. I'm not sleeping. I'm having intrusive thoughts about my preemie. I'm feeling guilty for not being at the bedside."
So you can see where this is going. It opened up a whole new conversation and lots of challenges for me to be able to address instead of just saying, how are things going? Oh, fine. And then the conversation doesn't go anywhere from there. But the mom is still left feeling all of these feelings, like exhausted, guilty, worried, overwhelmed. So I learned really quickly how to talk to patients and to listen to what they're saying, and not just with their words, but you know how they are, their nonverbal cues, right? Those are so, so important, too. So that was a great response. Thank you @honestlyleslie, for that response. We listen when no one else does. 
The next responder is @potassium_iv_push_rn, which is a very cool handle. And this person said, "Nurses are the most trusted profession because when no one else is there, we are." And again, 100% true. We've lived it. We have been there when the family is not there, when the physician is not there. We are the ones at the bedside. We are the ones that they rely on. We are the ones that they see when they wake up out of surgery. So, yeah, we are there when nobody else is. Love it. 
Okay, next response is from nurses_tradeoff. "We work with patients exactly where they are, without judgment and with a genuine commitment to helping them, no matter the circumstances. We let them know first that someone cares." Yes, every day. Every day, right? We work with them exactly where they are and without judgment. And I think this has got to be one of the top reasons that nurses are the most trusted profession. Because people who come to the hospital or come to the clinic and their hemoglobin A1C is twelve and their fasting blood sugar is 212, chances are they know what got them that way. And what good does it do for us to be like, "Wow, you've really been eating all the wrong things" or "You have not kept your stress level in check" or "You have not been exercising." You know, whatever it is, we're not going to judge them. We're going to meet them where they are, and then we're going to provide some education, right? I think this is so important. And I think, again, this is another nurse superpower. Thank you, @nurses_tradeoff for that response. 
Thank you to everyone who sent in a response, I appreciate it so much. I really enjoy your engagement. I think it's so important that we talk about these things, and I've just had fun reading all your comments. Next time, send me a voice message. Go to my website, theconversingnursepodcast.com, and click on that little red banner that says "Send me a voice message." I would love to hear you guys in real time. You guys get to hear my voice all the time. I would love to do the same. Thanks for chatting with me today. And thank you, nurses for being the most trusted profession for 22 years and running.