106: Basic vs Advanced Nursing 

e frameborder="0" height="200" scrolling="no" src="https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=DHT6095880011&light=true" width="100%">

Basic vs Advanced Nursing 

In this episode, I discussed a topic that might seem controversial at first: being basic. I delve into the importance of getting back to the basics of nursing and how it can actually make you an advanced practitioner. Through personal stories and insights, I shared how poor execution of basics can impact both patients and healthcare professionals. 

This topic is especially close to my heart as I reflect on the recent passing of my uncle and the conversations we had about nursing.

I urge every clinician to prioritize meeting the basic needs of patients every day and remind you that without the basics, everything else is worthless. 

Key takeaways:

01:18 - Liam’s uncle's experience of inadequate basic nursing care toward the end of his life 

04:04 - Basic human needs

05:53 - Basic needs of patients every day

14:36 - Improve your patient satisfaction

16:42 - How basics can make nurses more advanced practitioners

Thanks for listening!

Loved the episode? Leave us a review!

Want to dive deeper into this episode and search for something particular? Use our AI to search here!

5 Ways we can support you in your nursing career ✅

Join our Free Nurse Career Growth Hub and access our free nursing application, interview and career growth guides here!

Join our Nurse Career Academy and work with us to help guarantee your next nursing role!

Book a free Career Clarity Call with Liam to discuss your career situation!

Join our private FB community to surround yourself with like minded nurses!

Check out our Youtube Channel for more nurse career support!

Looking for awesome comfy Scrubs? ❤️ 

We are so grateful to BizCare for sponsoring the High Performance Nursing Podcast!

Click here to snag some scrubs! 

PS: this is NOT an affiliate link, meaning I do not make money if you use this link and the upside? You get AWESOME scrubs!

  • **This transcript was automatically generated using Descript.**

    Liam Caswell: One of the most powerful things that I have learned was when you're with a patient, that is your opportunity to get as much shit done as you can. Address all of the basic needs. Really commit to that person. We have so many distractions nowadays. When you are there, it is your opportunity. I guarantee if you implement this into your nursing care, you'll reduce your call bells, you will improve your patient satisfaction.

    hello, and welcome back to the High Performance Nursing Podcast. I'm so excited that you're here today. Today we are talking all things, being basic, being basic bitches. Today on the podcast, I want to talk to you today about why being basic makes you advanced. I think this is a really important topic for us to talk about and it's something that is close and dear to my heart today.

    So in this short episode, I'm gonna tell you a couple little things and stories of times where always like totally against the whole, we just need to get better at the basics thing, which I'm sure some of you also have heard and feel a little resistant to. And I'm also gonna share some personal insights and stories and lessons learned.

    Seeing how impactful, poor basics, poor execution of basics, implements our patients and ourselves. So, bit of backstory, as just many of you know, that have been listening to the podcast and following me on the Instagram at high performance nursing. If you're not there, come and join the party. unfortunately my uncle who I did a podcast episode on recently where I was very passionately preaching and ranting about.

    Nursing and the con state of nursing and whil. We're not gonna get into the tips of that today. unfortunately he passed away this week and, you know, having worked. And lived overseas, for the last 10 years and not really spent a lot of time with them. That was challenging for sure. But I've been able to make up for that in conversations when I've returned.

    And, you know, I'm visiting him most recently when I was in Scotland, visiting him in the Aged Care Home. But the reason why this comes to mind is because,my Uncle Olie, who was incredible, and had an amazing, amazing life and lived into his nineties, he basically ended his life having suffered at the lack of people's commitment to delivering just really good basic nursing care.

    Now, I don't want any of you today to think that I'm beating up nurses or heating on nurses or heating on the fact that we are all trying to just do our best in this system. I want a hundred percent see that. I get it. I feel it. I understand. But also what is really. Prominent and prevalent in this experience for me is that the thing that these directors of nursing and your senior nurses have been preaching for decades, which is, we gotta get back to the basics, really rung true during this time where my uncle was in acute public hospitals and in the aged care setting.

    So I think that often when we think about being basic, we think like, well, I'm beyond that. I've done that. You know, I've mastered that. But what this experience has proven for me to be true is that in fact, no, we're all trying to get to the big thing. We're trying to get to the big goal. We're trying to move forward and progress ourselves.

    We live in a culture and a society that values progress. This podcast is called High performance Nursing for our a reason, because I value progress, I value growth, but sometimes at the cost of what? At the cost of the basics now, never a true word was spoken in my career. Where when I reflect back and I think about my growth from being a 19 year old graduate nurse to being a 30 year old nurse unit manager, and that growth that happened in that time, it was ridiculous.

    And what I found to be true as I moved through each step of my career was that, that I kept, almost neglecting the basics of my life and my career. So, for example, as a human, I was neglecting my basic foundational needs. I was neglecting my thoughts. I was neglecting my emotions. I was neglecting the actions that I was or I wasn't taking, and I was creating these results, this reality for myself.

    Through lack of acknowledgement of my basic human needs, and then bring that over into my career. I was like building, you know, my career step by step. I was jumping left, right, and center, and I think all of that's fabulous, but we cannot sit here and not address the elephant in the room, which is.

    Without having those basic foundations as you build your career, it can be really difficult as you continue to grow and evolve. And that's what I've found to be true. As I grown and evolved, I was able to, you know, progress, towards my goals, but what I wasn't able to do was to really have a solid understanding of the basic fundamentals.

    And of course, what did I do? I went and got all these certificates and all of these things to validate that. I'm not saying there's a right or wrong here, I'm just sharing. Lived experience. Now, when we think about not doing the basics, we're never consciously thinking, well, I'm just gonna skip turning this patient today because I can't be bothered doing the basics cuz I'm better than being a basic bitch.

    That's not what I'm saying. But I do want you to really just think about it in question about where in your career, where in your, nursing care, could you maybe focus a little bit more on the basics? Now, the reason I bring this up today is, My uncle, bless his soul, rest in peace, beautiful human. He really did suffer in his last few years.

    And you know, I've been a nurse for over a decade. I've seen a lot of suffering. We all collectively see a lot of suffering and it's not a surprise to me that his basic needs weren't met. But I think what happens, And I'll talk through my career evolution. What happens when we work on the floor is that we are so consumed by the work that we do with our patients, our 4, 6, 12, 20 5 million patients, whatever you've got, we're so focused in their needs, and sometimes we absolutely know the basic needs, and sometimes we just know that we can't get there.

    And that's just part of the journey, But then when you move up in your career and you move to like a CN level or a team leader, you start to then become aware of everybody's needs, including the team's needs. And you look at the basics and the medium level needs and the complex needs. And you then have to kind of decipher where to go, what to do, what to sacrifice, what not to sacrifice.

    And as you continue to build your career and you get more of a bird's eye view, you start seeing more issues, more challenges, you start seeing, more problems with addressing people's needs, their basic, fundamental needs, and the higher you go in your. The more time you spend trying to navigate and deal with the basic problems that happen day to day.

    I can tell you firsthand from my experience as a nurse unit manager, it was very rare that somebody came into my education office or my nurse unit manager office and said something like, oh, you know what, Liam, we've just misinterpreted this. A BG today, no one ever really stuffed up the complex stuff. I think maybe because we just employed more critical thinking around it, maybe we were just more attuned to the severity or the risk that comes with that.

    And then what would happen on the flip side of that is I would spend my days in meetings with patients, relatives, angry, pissed off, relatives, and quite rightly so, that were coming in and saying things. My mom's teeth weren't cleaned today and they haven't been cleaned for three weeks because they're still stuck to the top of her mouth and just got food in there from last year, right?

    Like I laugh and joke, but it's not funny. These people would come into my office and they could see the suffering and they could see that their basic human needs of their relative were not even being met. In my uncle's context, this was a bloody pressure area care. He went into hospital with a broken hip, like a fracture.

    they couldn't do anything about it. Conservative management. He was bedbound. He's too old. Lots of comorbidities. Couldn't have an operation, was too high risk. So let's conservatively manage this, manage his pain. And then what happened over the period of two and a half weeks, no one thought about assessing his skin.

    Maybe they did. No one did anything with the information. Now, when I say to you as a clinician, bed Barron fracture, you know, 90 diabetes, peripheral vascular disease, think of all of the risks that come into your mind in that moment. This is such a great opportunity to be able to go, oh my goodness. So what are his risks?

    What can we be doing to improve his camp? In his case, he did not need all of these complex things cause all of the complex things had been taken off the table. We couldn't do the operation, we couldn't do you know, any interventions. We just had to manage what we had, and there was a missed opportunity for two and a half, three weeks, whereby every clinician now think about.

    Every nurse, every doctor, every physio, every occupational therapist, every member of the multidisciplinary team. Yes, I'm calling out the MDT In the broader mdt, it's everybody's responsibility, not just nurses, to then go and make these things happen. Think of all the people he would've interacted with over that period of time, and the missed opportunities to be able to get him an air mattress.

    He needs a frig air mattress. It wasn't until my aunt turned around and went. Why is he not on an air mattress? If he's not moving? He should be on an air mattress. This was two and a half, three weeks in, and then she was feeling all this guilt and my family were all feeling this guilt around, oh, we should have done that earlier.

    We should have known. We should have said something. No. We should not be having to advocate for our patients or relatives situations when they're in a hospital setting to have their basic human needs met. So from that lack of need being met, those basic needs, he developed a really nasty and horrific pressure injury.

    And that pressure injury became the bane of his life. And of course, with peripheral vascular disease and diabetes, pert nutrition, lack of mobility. This pressure injury just developed. It got progressively worse. And it was necrotic, it was red and inflamed at one stage. It was highly,extra, that's a bad word.

    I'm not gonna say that. highly, like a lot of fluid, Deus, he had a lot of pain, deep, deep pain in there. And it got so bad that he got an osteomyelitis in that, foot in the bone and there was literally nothing. They. It was completely mismanaged throughout the whole experience. That is a basic nursing need.

    It's a basic human need to alleviate pressure. And we know Ra, I'm gonna butcher the evidence here and I'm sure one of our amazing listeners may be Donna from Gut Care will correct me, but it only takes a couple of hours. For people to start developing pressure area damage, such a fundamental, basic need.

    And yet every clinician that looked at 'em, hey, they maybe did do the risk assessment. Maybe they did think, oh, he needs an air mattress, but did they action it? Did they actually do it? Why didn't they do it? There's so many things that come up, right? So when we're thinking about. Basic needs for ourselves and for our patients.

    I think too often, this is a great example of something so simple that could have avoided years of pain, grief, turmoil for him that could have been addressed in that moment in a preventative manner. And I don't really see an excuse or a reason why that couldn't and shouldn't have been done. Sometimes we just can't prevent things, right?

    And this was obviously, clearly meant to be his path, which just sucks. But it is what it is and we can't go back and change it. But what, I feel compelled to do is to share his story and share his lesson. Now, I don't wanna share all the suffering cause he had 90 incredible years and was like super resilient cognitively and as an individual, emotionally like so St.

    War and. The pain and the discomfort and being admitted into a residential aged care facility when you have all your faculties. Whew. That's tough. That's really, really hard. It also highlighted to me the the basic need for debrief. Even coaching, when I was in cm, I thought, oh, how difficult would this be to navigate this life change on your.

    I don't want us to forget, and sometimes I'll forget this, right? I don't want us to forget how vulnerable the people are that we are looking after. When they come into the hospital, they come through those doors at the front, of the hospital. It's almost like their, autonomy and their capacity and their ability to do anything for themselves is like removed instantly as they come in.

    And all of a sudden they are at like a very heightened vulnerable states where they are relying. Us where they are being kind and compassionate and nice, despite seeing that we're running around like catalyst chokes. They aren't asking for the things that they need when they're sitting in the chair cuz they can see how busy we are.

    They are not advocating on their own behalfs to get the things that they need to be able to progress towards their goals. And then we come in and say, oh, you know, why haven't you done your exercises today? And it's like a whole cycle of like, well, I didn't get exercises done because you were too busy and I didn't want to ask you and yada, yada, yada.

    And then to compound that, we then compound the issues that our patients have and our families have with trusting us as professionals. I think sometimes. We think, oh, we should be treated better. I think we should be treated better, but being treated better comes from treating others better. We can't ask for other people to treat us better as a profession.

    And to not do all of the things to us that happen in the workforce and then us neglect other people's needs, whether it's conscious or subconscious, it doesn't matter. It still happens. Now. We cannot meet all of the needs all of the time, but we can be human and we can acknowledge that there's a human behind the patient that we're caring for.

    And when we can go back and say things like, Hey. Today, I, I wasn't able to come and deal with these basic things for you. I'm so sorry. I apologize. Is there anything I can do for you? Now, one of the most powerful things, especially if you're a new nurse, but you know, more senior nurses might take this away.

    One of the most powerful things that I have learned was when you're with a patient, that is your opportunity to get as much shit done as you can. Address all of the basic needs. Really commit to that person. We have so many distractions nowadays. When you are there, it is your opportunity. I guarantee if you implement this into your nursing care, you'll reduce your call bells, you will improve your patient satisfaction.

    If you show up and you say, Hey, Ollie, how you going? What can I do for you? I've got 20 minutes. I'm with you for the next 20 minutes, we're gonna wash, we're gonna do this, do that. What are the things that haven't been done? Tell me all the things. I'm here, I'm all. And you open it up instead of like dictate, tell them, right, we're doing this, we're doing that.

    And they're sitting there so scared, so worried, so fearful to ask for what they actually need cuz we haven't created an environment where it's psychologically safe for them to do so. My Uncle Ollie's basic human needs just in hydration was one of the biggest points of contention during this hospital stay.

    What would happen is the doctors would say, You need to take more water in, you need to increase your fluid intake. And he'd be like, okay, sure, no worries. And then, they would then put the table at the end of the bed and he's the mobile. He couldn't get to the water. So my family would go in and they'd see the table at the end of the bed.

    And this could be at two o'clock in the afternoon. Cause in Scotland there's visiting times you can't visit till the afternoon. So you go in the afternoon and there's table's at the bottom of the bed and you're like, how long has the table. When did he last have a drink? And then when we asked, well, when my family asked the nurses and the medical team, when did he last have a drink?

    Oh, he had a drink with his medications at eight o'clock this morning. What we can't build trust in our patients and our families if they're like, yeah, it's two. And you're telling him that he needs to drink more. And then the same nurses at the same healthcare assistants would walk in and be like, you haven't drank this drug yet.

    Well, cause the drug's been at the end of the bed. It is deeply, deeply frustrating. And, Hey, I have made all of these mistakes. I have done all of these things. I've told people I've been a hypocrite. I've told them to drink more and that I haven't filled a cup up. Because we're hashtag. But I want you to think about this.

    When you go into your clinical practice, whether you're in public-private community, whether you're a solopreneur, whatever you're doing in your nursing career, I want you to find the opportunities to create more space for addressing the basic, fundamental needs. I wanna give you another example just to further show you why, you know, you can be the most advanced clinician, but if you are skipping over the basics and you are not willing to connect and communicate and really create a safe space for our patients to ask for their basic needs to be met, it doesn't matter in my viewpoint, based on my experie.

    It's pointless what you're doing, right? It's like being able to read an ecg, but not being able to communicate the findings to our patient, like the ECG skills, great, but without being able to communicate it and break it down into lay language and really make it clear for the family, what's the point?

    There's no point, okay. That we've all seen those patients that the doctors walk in, they're like, yeah, you've got type two respiratory failure and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you've got this buffering, this bloody blah, blah, blah. And the patient's like, what did they say? Huh? I've got what? Like, am I gonna die?

    They don't know, right? Because the doctors are really good at being advanced, but they're not so great at being basic. I think as nurses, one of our most amazing skill sets and abilities is to meet people where they're at and to indulge in being basic. Being basic makes our life so much easier when we try and get fancy, ma.

    It doesn't happen. It doesn't work. So another situation that Ali experienced was, this, you know, dressing of his, this wound care dressing. And I haven't been there and I haven't seen a lot of the wound care management and the dressing changes. and it's, you know, it's been a little while since I've been in the hospital.

    Am I gonna lie? And I don't profess to be the most clinically up to date on this podcast. That's why we talk a lot about mindset and, careers and your growth and personal development. The human side of nursing, I'm not here to talk about clinical best practice. With that being said, he was, having his dressing changed.

    Well, actually his dressing was soaked through. When I visited and it just so happened that the community district nurse attended at the same time, which was great. So she was lovely. She came in and she was chatting away and really connected, built beautiful rapport. That's one thing I will say about NHS nurses.

    I think that we are really great at building rapport, in my experience. So this nurse built rapport and she, saw like all of the things and, she really took the time to listen to him. But there is missed opportunities there. Again, now we're not perfect, but if you're doing a really complex heel dressing that is causing pain just by being there, like without even touching it, and he had to hand his leg off the side of the bed so there's no pressure on it, even though it was on an air mattress and we kept telling him off, that means that it's quite painful.

    Now they came in and they dictated when his dressing change was being done based on their schedule, not based on his schedule, not based on what he needed. Again, these things happen, but surely we can plan this right ahead of time and we'd say Jane's coming, tomorrowish coming between 10 to 12, and she's gonna see Ollie then.

    So let's organize some pain relief for the day ahead of time. Now what I found fascinating was in nursing homes in the uk now there are no nurses. Yeah, you heard me say that, right? There are no freaking nurses, so my Uncle Oie kept relaying to the, people that worked there as nurses, and I was like, I think they're carers, Holly, and he is, oh no, they're nurses.

    They're nurses. They're not a real nurse like you, though. A lot. So they're carers. Okay. So, these guys are working through, you know, blister pipe. They're do an incredible job. I'm not, beating them up, but they. Obviously what's lacking there is the basic ability to critically think, right?

    And they're kind of waiting to respond. They're waiting for triggers to be able to implement something. So this nurse came in, she was lovely, built rapport, connected, and then said, right, we're gonna do this dressing cuz it needs, it's not due for a couple of days, but it needs to be done. I thought, oh my god, thank you.

    So, what I did not know was she was just about ready to just pull the whole thing off, like literally rip it. So was like, Hey, like let me help you. Let me hold the leg. Like let me get involved here. Let me, I was trying not to do that awkward nurse thing where you're like, I'm a nurse and all of the things.

    So I was helping out and I was chatting, Wayne. I was having a look and, She was like, oh yeah, it's really bad. There's lots of extra day. There's, you know, a lot of, strike through in the dressing. It was soaking wet, it was planting, and, he had a lot of pain and it was stuck. It was a, I think it was a nonabsorbent dressing, but it was stuck to the wound bed, and then she's peeling it back so gently.

    You know, cause I think I put a little bit of pressure on her. I said, well let's just take it slowly. Would that be good? I was trying to do that whole thing like, let's you know as a relative stew, let's just take it slow, shall we? So she started peeling it back and I said to her, I said like, why are we not soaking this?

    It's clearly very stuck and as she's pulling it back, he's on bloody warfarin is bleeding, right? Like, so let's, like I said, can we just grab some saline and soak it cuz you're gonna clean it anyway and blah, blah, blah. Or we don't have any saline. It's a nursing home. I'm like, oh my God. Of course you don't.

    Anyway, they managed to find some cause I said, no, let's not rip this off. And advocated on his behalf. And he was shrieking in pain, like shrieking, like it gave me chills to hear these signs come from another human. And we were like, no enough. So we got the saline, we soaked it off, and then it came off.

    And this one just looked so nasty and inflamed. It was just like past an extra de galore. There was still necrotic parts to it. It just looked horrific and his soy of relief when it came off gently through soaking it, I was like, oh, every time this gets changed, you need to get it soaked. Do not just rip it off, you're just causing microtrauma to the skin every time you pull it off.

    Anyway, we got it done and I. I was very curious, you know, you know me. I was like, oh, is there a reason why he's not being offered pain relief before? Oh, it's available to him. And I said, but yeah, he's 90. He's not gonna ask for, he's really not gonna ask for it. It reminded me of being a nurse on the floor.

    When I first started as a grad. I used to, every time I did a medication round, I'd be like, by the way, John, just letting you know you've got all of these drugs available to you, should you need them? Do you need any of them whilst I'm here? So I worked. Bloody busy medical admission planning unit. I don't have time to come back and forth.

    So I was trying to batch my work, right? So a little top tip there. Offer the prn, let people know that it's there. They don't see the drug chart, they don't even know that it's there. So that was something that we talked about. And I said, well, why can't he have pain relief before? And then officer, no, it's fine, son.

    I'm strong, I'll be fine. I said, no, this is not an opportunity to be brave. So again, his basic need for pain relief and pain management wasn't being. And I could go on and on and on. But the whole point of this podcast today is to highlight to us all amazing, you amazing high performing clinicians. Cause that's what all of you are.

    Our patients and us have basic needs that we need to meet. We must, must, must commit to making those basic needs a priority in our day-to-day. And in fact, sometimes I even used to leave and if I had got all of the complex stuff done cuz it was exciting and juicy and gory and you know, all of the things, and a hardened committee to the basic stuff, I would classify that as a win.

    But very rarely did I leave being like, wow, I got all the basic stuff done today, but all of those extra things I didn't get done. And I was like, oh, I'm so proud of myself. I would beat myself up like it wasn't enough. But I want to give you permission to go into work and to know that when you commit to delivering the basics and that's what you offer to your patients and their families, you have succeeded.

    That is glorious. You should be the proudest nurse on the Earth, you should walk out Head Hill time. All the extra stuff is fluff. It's advanced. It's complex. Without the basics, it is worthless. Without the basics, it is worthless. Okay. And I used to, to wrap up, I used to always, always, always sit in these meetings with directors of nursing.

    And they would constantly harp on about getting back to basics. And before I became an educator and a nurse unit manager, I would hear these conversations on the florist nurse and I'd be thinking, how dare they, how dare they think that we're not good at delivering the basics? And what did they know?

    What did they know? Like they don't even understand, you know, as if they've never worked on the floor before. And I used to have a lot of resistance towards that. Until I became an educator and an nu because what happens when you cross that line and you are on the other side of the fence, is that, like I said at the start, every problem that comes through your door is the basic of most basic problems, and you now at this senior nursing level, are dealing with the basic of most basic problems, and it is so destroy.

    It's so destroying because we are yet to find a way of like resolving these issues ahead of time. Why is it that people don't clean people's teeth? I used to sit there perplexed being like, I don't know what more we can do. We can give you more staff. Sure. But does that mean that the teeth are like, does that give me a guarantee that the teeth are gonna be cleaned?

    These are the conversations that are happening at a senior nursing level and every day the the dawn would say Back to basics. Back to basics. And I would feel a little resistance, but the more that I saw, the more I realized. Yeah. Everybody wants to come to that session on ABG analysis and like learning how to deal with the complex trauma or you know, how to, the deep anatomy and physiology of, yeah, I wound care and blah, blah, blah.

    But every problem that came through that door, every issue that goes through a quality and safety department in the hospital, every incident report, every risk man is a basic problem that's not being met. It's a basic. It's not complex. It is lack of communication. It is lack of meeting people's needs, nine times outta 10, literally 99.9% of the time.

    So it would be a mess of me to sit here and say that we don't need to just reorientate our brain on the basics. We just need to funnel our efforts into reminding ourselves why we're nurses to deliver. Basic foundational, basic, but complex foundational nursing care. Because I am a firm believer that when you master the basics, that's what makes you advanced, and that's what I'm gonna leave you with today.

    I know I went on a bit of a ranada. I feel passionate, and I wanted to tell Ollie's story in a way that is an amazing lesson for all of us. It brought me so much joy to be able to help and advocate on his. It also gave me so much joy to do the basics for him. When I was there, I said, give me those glass seats.

    Give me those teeth. I need to clean them right now. When did they last get cleaned? And that just filled me with such joy in happiness that I could deliver that. I'm gonna tell you right now, there is nothing more fulfilling as a nurse then meeting somebody's basic need or remember specifically meeting a patient's.

    Where she had been in a coma for a couple of weeks in ICU and I took her to the bathroom for her first shower. I said, what, we've got 12 hours to date together? What do you wanna do? Like, what do we doing today? And she had just come outta a coma and she was, oh my God, this guy is nuts. But she said, you know what?

    I just wanna feel human again. I get go response, talking about, I just wanna feel human again. I just wanna have a shower. And I want to wash my hair. And of course she had the longest hair on the earth and I'm not a hairdresser and that's not my skillset. I'm forte, but I was her nurse for the day and I believe that that was my gift to that patient that day.

    And in taking her to the shower, we spent like two hours in that shower. I'm not kidding you. I was so sweating. I was a hot mess. By the end of that, I needed to shower myself. I still had 10 hours left of the day, but it was worth that she had such an amazing experience. She felt clean, she felt human again, and gave her a.

    Dignity back. We put some nice clothes on her, like at least a top, so she felt like herself. Her hair was washed, and it smelled beautiful, and it was all brushed out even though it was so painful for me to brush it out for her, and she just was so, so grateful. I bonded with her. I connected with her. And we went back to the room for the day and she just was so happy.

    Her husband came in and he was so happy and never seen us sitting up for two and a half weeks, and there she was looking all pretty with our hair, all done. That is the gift that we give to our patients in meeting their basic and complex needs. And we don't do it for what I'm about to tell you, but I'll tell you how much of an impact that had on that patient.

    I got a, an email from my old nurse unit manager in the UK when I moved to Australia a year. And she said, Hey, Liam, I just wanted to let you know that I did an intensive care follow up session with the patient that you looked after. And, the whole time she talked about that day that she had a shower and when she had her hair, her hair brushed and hair washed, and she said, you're never gonna believe what she did, but she's just had a baby boy.

    And she called him. I get chills to this day thinking about that and I don't say that tolo, I say that cause I'm immensely proud that in that moment with all of my advanced skills, with my tracheostomy skills, my central venous access device skills, my multiple, you know, hemofiltration device skills, my ventilation skills, my deep knowledge of intensive care nursing, that on that day my patient needed their hair washed, and I absolutely frigging nailed it and I made her feel human.

    There's nothing better as a nurse, so I want you to go off and find those opportunities for yourself. We all have these beautiful stories. Our patients deserve, their basic needs to be met. And I will see you in in the next episode, and I look forward to hearing your stories in social media, on social media about why being basic is freaking amazing, and why being basic

    is gonna make you advanced.

    I'll chat you in the next episode.

Previous
Previous

107: Prevention VS Cure - Grad Success Series 

Next
Next

105: 2023 Graduate Nurse Q and A LIVE - Grad Success Series