Throughout the country and the world, we're all in different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic-maybe you were in an epicenter or maybe you had the good fortune of being in a community that wasn't hit hard. Or perhaps you've experienced a deep personal toll. We're all trying to pick up the pieces of shattered norms, trying leadership, devastating loss, economic turmoil, sheltering at home, social distancing, and distraught staff. We're anxious to press the reset button.
What kind of leadership works on a battlefield? I've learned it requires quick thinking, flexibility, incident command structures, calm, confidence, visibility, communication, moral courage, caring, and disciplined decision-making. Leadership matters. Besides the speed of needed change, the challenges have included redesigning care and staffing models on the fly, developing crash courses on critical care nursing, and completely transforming hospitals in a nanosecond compared with our usual planning models. Despite command-control crisis management, we've listened with an ear to the ground like never before and allowed all the ingenuity, testing of new practices, and innovation possible. This takes grit and resilience. These are experiences we want to learn from when we reset for the future.
Leadership especially matters as we advocate for staff safety. Between PPE shortages and staggering short staffing during surge volumes, we were barely able to provide for our own-a basic value for nurse leaders. How do we ensure patient care under these conditions and in the face of an unknown disease that ravages lungs and can lead to weeks on a ventilator with dismal survival rates? Not to mention COVID-19 recovery challenges that range from living alone to full-blown cognitive and physical rehab. We have no playbook, no literature, no evidence. Add to this all the ways that no patient visitation changed everything, with nurses becoming surrogate families and companions to isolated patients. And then came the heartbreaking video calls for families to say goodbye to dying patients, one after another. How do we do it? With adaptability, courage, and never losing sight of our unwavering advocacy for patients and staff.
Will we go back to "normal" when we press the reset button? I hope not. We've learned not to waste. We've learned how to virtualize everything: meetings, ED visits, provider visits, goals-of-care conversations, education, and both patient-family and patient-nurse communication. We've learned to do things differently-what's actually value-added and what isn't-and we've laid out an indelible image of true nursing to the world. Let's not lose these advances when we reset.
We've been affirmed as a profession during an International Year of the Nurse and Midwife that we didn't expect, glorified as frontline heroes. We've been tested and we've led the way in pandemic patient care with brave, compassionate, smart, and innovative community leadership. I don't have to press the reset button to know that I've never been so proud to be a nurse or of nursing.
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