DOI: 10.1097/01.JBI.0000393228.79927.49
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Issn Print: 1449-7700
Publication Date: 2008/04/01
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Excerpt
Like many teenagers Professor Kitson's view of the world was idealistic but she was also a pragmatist. She says, “I did want to do something useful, but I also wanted to travel. And I thought, being a nurse is a very, very good occupation because every society needs nurses and I wanted to do something useful.”
“I liked the idea of doing something really practical as well as theoretical, so it's those mixtures that always attracted me to it [nursing] and it still intrigues me. I think it was Florence Nightingale who said that the fundamentals of nursing are not known. Granted, she was writing in the 1860's but I would say that it's probably quite true as well that we actually don't really know the scientific base of a lot of caring interventions. We know a lot about science and clinical medicine, but there's a lot about caring that we still haven't really started to uncover.”
Her first shift as a qualified nurse was on a Monday morning she recalls, “The sister was off duty so there was a senior staff nurse on duty, and about half way through the morning [it was an acute medical ward] she was called off to take over in another ward. It was my very first day in this new hospital, so I found myself in charge of the ward. I was totally petrified but thankfully nobody died – I didn't do any major damage.”
“And then I realised that what was very important in those days - we were talking early eighties, a long time ago - that you had to be very good with bowel management. So I used to lie awake at night trying to work out who needed suppositories because it was really cool in the nursing handover, when you were in charge to say who needed suppositories or not.” I suppose the role models I had at that time still believed they knew all the patients personally and they tried to ensure that we did not overlook the fundamentals. However, on reflection, there were a lot of things we could have done much better.
She can also still remember some of her first patients. “In fact,” she says, “there was one man in his late fifties who had been admitted with Guillain-Barre Syndrome and was in hospital for 4 months in the ward where I was the staff nurse. I was his primary nurse and I can remember afterwards going to visit him and enjoying seeing his recovery. Then about 3 or 4 years ago, I get this letter out of the blue from him, and he's now in a nursing home and he wrote to tell me all his medical history. I got 20 years worth in one letter, but it was lovely and then I went to see him when I was over in Northern Ireland. So you know, these bonds are quite deep.”
“Nursing is full on in every sense,” Professor Kitson says, “Every sense is used, smell, sight, sound, hearing, vision, you know that's the joy and the challenge of nursing.
