Nursing Self-Care: A Journey to Optimal Healing Presence

This essay delves into the critical importance of self-care for nurses, recognizing that they, too, require care. It outlines three primary self-care goals: the development of compassion, the practice of reflection, and the cultivation of non-judgmental acceptance. The essay details how each goal would positively impact nursing practice, enhancing patient care and fostering a more understanding approach. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for lifelong learning, including exemplary life care skills, and advocates for creating a healthy and healing work environment. The author suggests practical steps towards achieving self-care, such as self-commitment, facilitating an optimal environment, and workplace culture transformation. Structural changes within organizations are also proposed to promote safe practice and value both employees and patients. The essay also highlights key concepts like self-compassion, awareness, reflection, and gratitude, supported by Hernandez's (2009) work. Essential support systems for achieving self-care, including colleagues, institutional administration, and self-conviction, are discussed. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of evidence-based approaches, such as utilizing statistics on nursing burnout and turnover, to convince institutional administration to prioritize self-care, ultimately improving patient care quality.

Running head: NURSING SELF-CARE 1
Nursing Self-Care
Name of Author
Institution
Date of Submission

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NURSING SELF-CARE
High expectations are often placed on nurses without realizing that they are humans too
who need of care. The employment structures often fail to consider the welfare of the nurses and
are mainly focused on the needs of the patients. Practicing as a nurse I envision achieving three
major goals of self-care that focus on the self. These include development of compassion,
reflection and to develop a non-judgmental acceptance. Compassion as a goal would affect my
practice by guiding my self-understanding and influences my understanding of the patient’s
needs. My patients would be able to receive compassionate care that meets their health needs
satisfactorily because I would be able to understand the situations of the patients like it were my
own.
Secondly, reflection would significantly affect my nursing practice. Reflection about
personal abilities, critical thinking skills and other organizational initiatives like emergency
responses would improve the health outcomes of patients and their experiences of care. Hence,
reflection as a self-care goal would help in the improvement of practice quality by exploring self-
reflection prior to acting on the patient’s needs. Lastly, non-judgmental acceptance as a goal
would enable me to work with patients without judging the process and experiences encountered
before. It enables independent and objective care delivery to patients in a compassionate manner
and not being biased with past experiences.
One major lifelong learning goal I would adopt will be to be exemplary in life care skills.
Achieving self-care can be a daunting task; the initial step towards its realization is the self-
commitment to operate in a healthy work environment. Secondly, I would have to facilitate the
development of an optimal environment that is healing to both self and to patients. Thirdly,

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realization of self-care demands for workplace culture transformation that takes into
consideration all the salient needs of both employees and patients. Subsequently, self-care
requires the development of structures in the organization that promotes safe practice and
optimally healing work environment. The developed structures should be able to appreciate the
sanctity of individuals and care for the patients. The structural changes suggested must have the
capability of honoring other colleagues and self. Hence, it would require the collection of views
and perspective of employees with regards to promotion of self-care as a way of improving
aspects of patient care. Lastly, the goal towards self-care would involve embracing the critical
concepts that include “self-compassion, awareness, reflection, intentionality, non-judgmental
attitude as well as gratitude” as championed by Hernandez (2009).
The necessary support system for achieving self-care would be colleagues at work place,
institutional administration and self-conviction. Further, conferences and workshops aimed at
promoting self-care strategies would be essential towards supporting the initiative by providing
the technical aspects. Also, the availability of the past statistics related to nursing burnout,
turnover, drug abuses and medical errors would provide adequate evidence to underpin the need
for change. The data would be used to convince institutional administration to promote the self-
care needs of nurses and other employees as an evidence-based approach towards realizing
improved quality of care to patients.

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Reference
Hernandez, G. (2009). The HeART of self-CARING: A journey to becoming an optimal healing
presence to ourselves and our patients. Creative Nursing, 15(3), 129.