We have all heard the saying "Practice what you preach!" After all, "Preach what you practice" just sounds, backwards? In previous president's messages, I have written about thinking differently and choosing activities that accomplish more than one goal. I'd like to spend some time thinking about combining these messages and what this means for the future of nursing practice.
Promoting a culture of health for all is the center of the efforts of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine ([NASEM]; formerly the Institute of Medicine). The Academies published the Future of Nursing 2020-2030 report to build out these efforts and include a goal of achieving racial equity and equity across circumstances, communities, and abilities (NASEM, 2021).
The third recommendation in the Future of Nursing 2020-2030 report challenges nursing leaders and organizations to implement structures, systems, and evidence-based interventions to promote the health and well-being of nurses (NAMS, 2021). For a moment, you would think that the profession that protects, promotes, and optimize the health of their patients knows exactly how to protect, promote, and optimize their own health. However, a systematic review by Stanulewicz et al. (2019) concluded that interventions that focused only on educating about conditions were less effective than interventions that focused on behavior changes. In other words, just because we know something is good for us does not mean we do it.
As an example, the American Nurses Association (2017) Health Risk Appraisal reported that only 16% of nurses consumed five or more servings of fruits and vegetables. Although I only know a small sample group of the 4 million nurses, I am certain all of them know that we should eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Safe to say there is room for improvement, and it seems like patients could ask us to practice what we preach.
The issue of nurses not attending to their own wellness is not a new problem. Nurses do not have a great track record of taking care of themselves. In fact, the American Nurses Association launched the Healthy Nurse Healthy Nation in May of 2017 to connect nurses, nursing students, nursing organizations, and other stakeholders to promote wellness. The program focuses on physical activity, rest, nutrition, quality of life, and safety. There are more than 238,000 participants involved in this largely online community promoting the health of nurses. NAON participates in the Healthy Nurse Healthy Nation movement. If you don't already, you should look for the Healthy Nurse Healthy Nation spotlight in our NAON news. While the pandemic may have challenged our abilities to care for ourselves, it's time to think differently and be the change we want to see in 2022 and beyond.
Another way to think about our health as nurses is related to our specialty of musculoskeletal health. In our quest to enhance the lives of our patients and ourselves and to advance our careers as orthopaedic nurses, we need to think about our own bones. NAON recently partnered with American Bone Health-a nonprofit organization dedicated to building and keeping strong and healthy bones for life with practical and up-to-date information and resources to engage, educate, and empower people to prevent bone loss, osteoporosis, and fractures. A collaborative group of NAON and American Bone Health representatives has designed a study to determine whether using a fracture risk calculator and receiving targeted emails based on fracture risk will change bone health behaviors and/or nursing practice of nurses older than 45 years who identify as orthopaedic nurses. If you have not already seen the callout for volunteers to participate, be on the lookout.
As part of the research team, I want to provide a bit more context. The study was designed with a commonsense idea that if someone practices healthy behaviors, that they will implement those behaviors in their nursing practice. Although the idea of healthy individuals implementing healthy behaviors into their nursing practice makes a lot of sense, we were not able to find any literature to support the hypothesis. To make this specific to orthopaedics, we wondered if nurses knew their risk for fracture, would they change their behavior? Would the personal behaviors translate into a change in nursing practice?
The idea is intriguing-and flips the idea of "Practicing what you preach" into "Preaching what you practice." If we know and support our own bone health as orthopaedic nurses, might we implement bone health knowledge and behaviors for our practice? Imagine a culture where we both cared for our own bone health and the bone health of our patience. A culture of both practicing what we preach and preaching what we practice may provide a better future for us all.
References