Nursing: What Does It Means To Be Humane

Nursing is a very diverse profession full of diverse people. If you can imagine an area of healthcare, it probably already exists and there are nurses working in it. One of the common threads tying all these specialties together is that they have patients. It could be a research nurse working a clinical trial, a prison nurse caring for inmates, or a dialysis nurse working in a clinic; they all have patients. Providing care to patients is the reason most, if not all, nurses decided to seek higher education and become nurses. Unfortunately, some nurses are perceived as being insufficient in their emotional connection to patients. Maybe they do not express themselves in an emotional way naturally. Some may become jaded and lose it over time. In

If you put the word ‘humane’ into a search engine you will get results for animal shelters and news articles for animal practices. But what does ‘humane’ really mean? According to Merriam-Webster “marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans.” Additionally, the Farlex Medical Dictionary says ‘humane” is “pertaining to the avoidance of infliction of pain, discomfort, and harassment”. Nurses know that they must be emotionally humane. There are numerous protocols concerning nursing care that are designed to protect the physical health of patients. Fundamentally, nurses are told to treat the whole health of a patient. Every new grad and newly licensed nurse should know how to not harm a patient physically, but what about supporting a patient emotionally? Where is the line drawn when it comes to emotion? In what ways can a nurse seek to be emotionally

Related to empathy is sympathy, but they are very different and should not be used interchangeably. While empathy is used to help understand a person, sympathy leads more toward only emotion (Santo, Pohl, Saiani, & Battistelli, 2013). Empathy is the active understanding of an emotional state. Sympathy is not thoughtful and may lead to blind pity that is both superficial and ineffective (Sinclair, et al., 2015). Sympathy does not help lift someone up from where they are but rather joins them emotionally. Many receivers of sympathy often feel it is not being used to help them. Instead, the person being sympathetic is using sympathy as a shield to protect themselves (Sinclair, et al., 2015). When receivers of sympathy feel this way, it can lead to a negative