Oriana Beaudet and Rick Rekedal
Bringing Innovation to Nursing
Did you know that one out of every 68 persons in the U.S. is a nurse? And 86% of all nurses are female? Nurses have the opportunity to bring immense innovation to healthcare in a time when it is needed.
What does storytelling bring to innovation?
Stories unite people and help people to understand and transcend data points. Nursing is a space where nurses walk alongside, live and work with people in their community and they care for them. And part of that is also carrying their stories.
With the power of stories and the intimacy of those caregiving moments, we continue to hold those stories as a form of remembering, but also of teaching the next generation of caregivers who come after us.
Achieving higher nursing retention numbers and bringing new nurses into the field seem to call for innovation, don’t they?
Absolutely innovation is critical to the nursing experience because it moves us from a place of things happening to us as individuals to the belief that as individuals, we can impact this system, right? We are moving to this place of problem solving and that our individual knowledge and expertise can actually shift all of these things, all of the complexity, all of the problems that we can actively address these things in front of us to make this better. Because so many individuals across our profession are there because they are mission driven and they want to make sure that the care that’s provided is the best care possible, and we want to support them in doing that. So absolutely, I believe innovation is critical to new nurses entering the profession and the nurses who are practicing now.
We want to ensure that nurses who are working in the field have a way to meaningfully engage in the care that is delivered, how our organizations are run and the outcomes that we want to see for the individuals that we care for.
What type of roles are available for nurses beyond hospitals?
Nursing is kind of the world’s best kept secret in the sense that it is one degree that opens thousands of doors and job opportunities, not in just traditional roles. A lot of people, when you think about what is the work of a nurse, they’ll think of a traditional care environment. But the reality is we have nurses who are working in public health. We have nurses working in communities, we have nurses who are leading farming initiatives. We have nurses who are helping to design cities. We have nurses who are working as engineers, nurses who are architects, nurses who are stepping into industry roles and into technology roles.
What are some of the steps to become an innovator?
When we hear someone else’s story, it may spark inspiration, an idea of our own. Then you need courage, and in the work environment permission, to try out your idea. Then begins the work, and the temerity, of reshaping the idea to make it work. Finally you put it into practice and celebrate the innovation. Recognizing and celebrating these new ideas and being able to celebrate the nurse who brought that to me is going to be such a critical part of creating a culture in nursing where new ideas are welcome. Innovation in that sense recognizes that that process in the middle, it can be a bit of a grind when you really are reshaping the idea and trying to see how it could best be implemented. But if we stick to it, wow, we could really see some breakthroughs.
Resources and Links
Register for Nursing for Innovation Event: Belmont.edu/nursingsummit
