What Makes A Good Nurse?

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Like any other career, nursing has its own set of challenges. However, only a few careers reward you as much you get in a nursing career. The career offers you the chance to have job security, earn a good salary every month, have positive career advancement opportunities, and above all, helps make a change in the lives of the people. These are a few of the many benefits that this personally rewarding and emotionally gratifying career offers. The new students aspiring to become nurses should not discard its demanding nature. The work of nurses is emotionally stressful physically tiring.  

Nurses make the largest group of healthcare professionals in the entire healthcare industry. However, the demand for professional nurses is still skyrocketing. In the coming years, the healthcare sector will need more skilled nurses than the industry can produce. Therefore, it is also the career that can adjust a larger part of the unemployed population. Just like other careers, nurses also require a set of skills and qualifications to perform their job exceptionally.

What makes this career great is the personal and professional qualities. These qualities are integral to all the nurses associated with any field of the nursing profession. For instance, many qualities of a great nurse manager, such as attention to detail, effective communication, etc., are the same as those of a cardiac nurse practitioner or an intensive care unit nurse.  Due to these qualities, nurses can be the best version of themselves and create a better environment for their fellow nurses and the patients. So, what qualities make a good nurse?  Let’s explore those qualities.

• Compassion Is A Vital Ingredient

Nurses' job involves attending to sick patients and working around families witnessing the difficult health situation of their loved ones. Therefore, having compassion is a must quality for a good nurse. With compassion, they can understand other’ pain, acknowledge their mental and physical difficulties, and help the patients’ families deal with their grief.  Qualities like organization skills and teamwork can be learned, but it is tough to practice having a kinder heart; the ability to empathize with others runs deeper than that.  Just imagine a nurse quietly sitting beside the family who just lost their loved one, knowing that their presence is enough to convey the message.  Meeting patients and their families at their level, thinking the way they do, and then responding to satisfy their concerns is a unique ability of a skilled and compassionate nurse.

• Emotional Stability Is A Necessity

Nurses’ job is all about seeing people experience physical pain and bear the emotional traumas.  These incidents happening many times in their daily life bring powerful emotions like sadness and surprise.  Therefore, emotional stability is a necessity to excel in this career.  

A nurse’s job is to support the patients and their families without breaking down under stress and emotional fatigue.  However, one should not confuse emotional stability with an absence of emotions. Your emotions help you navigate the circumstances around you. Emotional stability in the case of nursing means to function properly around the patients and their grieving families. Research also highlights that nurses with better emotional stability have better concentration and problem-solving abilities.

• Organization Skills Are A Must

Good organizational skills can make a nurse a great nurse. There are often chaotic times in the hospital during an emergency or when a patient’s health suddenly crashes down. The most organized nurses grasp the situation in the least time. They quickly adapt and prioritize their responsibility and bring the situation under control.

Organizational skills are also needed because there is no ‘one task at a time’ in a nurse’s job. They are often working back and forth with multiple patients. They might be helping one patient to recline while giving medicine to another. So, a nurse with topsy-turvy habits having no sense of organization can easily crash in such a situation. There are also more occurrences of mistakes without a propensity for multitasking. So, organization skills make their work easier and impact patient care and the whole care team. Nurses with good organizational skills often keep their patients happy and their colleagues satisfied.

• Flexibility

There is no one day in the life of a nurse when exciting and often strange things don’t happen.  Learning and doing new things is a constant element of their work life. These incidents make nurses more flexible in their job duties and readying them to wear various hats in one day.  They might be working as caregivers, and the next moment you might find them helping patients at the administration desk. Likewise, a day planned to be spent caring for neonates can suddenly change into a hectic and high-intensity day with more attendance in the labor room.  

• Maintain Personal Safety

Good nurses not only maintain the safety of their patients, but they stay safe as well.  Nurses who meet the personal safety standards of the hospital does not become carriers of the diseases for their patient and their families. For instance, those assisting the doctors in surgeries or giving initial patient care to the victims of accidents must know how to protect themselves from cuts as they can cause infections.
Nurses have worked through the pandemic with cumbersome hazmat suits, painful facemasks, and shields but prevented the spread of the virus through them.

• Able To Work In Teams

Another quality of good nurses is their ability to work in teams to give complete and coordinated care to their patients.  Along with making their patients a priority, they don’t miss any chance of supporting their colleagues as well.  It could be by doing overtime in someone else’s place so that one of their teammates can attend to their family engagements.  

Nursing is an amazing profession offering you challenges at every step of your way and letting you test your limits.  Nursing is among careers that let you come home with a sense of relief, making you proud of your endeavors of doing well for humanity.  It demands flexibility, compassion, empathy, and teamwork to be categorized as a good nurse.  Good nurses also take care of their safety and their patients.