So I ran RNchat last night to open up discussion about The Placenta Incident (click over to read about it).
It’s a movie in the making. Generally speaking, I sometimes wonder if the ghost of Warden Samuel Norton in The Shawshank Redemption still possesses a part of the nursing profession.
Unless the patient related to this story was actually harmed, the story is largely pretty humorous.
And yet dramatic events like these, which garner media attention, displace important issues that get almost none.
I mean: there are so many horrifying things that happen in Healthcare every single day:
- Someone hangs a bag of Dopamine thinking it’s normal saline and runs it in at 250
- A bitter, burnt-out nurse curses out a a student for forgetting his pin and the patient in the room behind them falls out of bed and breaks her hip
- Ralph in Accounting shows the CFO that the hospital can save $250,000 a year by cutting nursing staff and the next year the hospital pays out $2,500,000 in litigation due to nursing burnout
And now we have social media thrown into the mix:
- Nursing instituions lead by (good) people who don’t know the difference between “a” Twitter and a sparrow are handing out sentences on a generation that uses both everyday without taking the time to find out what it’s all about.
- The generation that grew up on digital technologies and social media are learning hard lessons about the consequences of a dopey tweet, a weird status update on Facebook and that picture of their sprawled out naked body on the floor of Delta Tau Delta.
It’s so easy to miss what matters most when you’re stuck on what matters least.
That may have been what’s happened here in this story.
I don’t know about you, but I think we’re kinda losing our minds and I think the best option we have of saving ourselves from our own dopery is mindfulness.
Social media may be the most disruptive part of human evolution – ever. It comes, however, with prices: mindfulness may be its biggest.
We really do live in interesting times.
No shortage of material for artists to grip.
Maybe there’s a metaphor for the need of a re-birth of nursing somewhere in that placenta.
Nursing will never be emerge from all of the dopey stereotypes dumped on it over the decades unless it finally puts down to rest all the emotional violence within its own house.
Human.
Humility.
Humor. The laugh is the crowning achievement of evolution. Let’s use it more often – in nursing and everywhere else.
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Phil Baumann 