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Late Night Musings - Nursing, Trauma, and Reflective Writing...

By David L. Masuda, MD, MS posted 06-26-2018 12:21

  
Over the years I'd become increasingly fascinated with the idea of helping our health administration students develop their writing skills. If your institution is like mine, students to get a significant amount of practice with the "usual" writing assignments – strategic plans, executive summaries and the like.

One type of writing that students may not have as much positive experience with his personal writing, designed to

Earlier this week I discovered a new publication from the National Academy Medicine entitled "Nursing, Trauma, and Reflective Writing". The piece cites statistics were likely all familiar with – 85% of intensive care unit nurses report wanting a better job, 64% reporting insomnia and almost half described being "emotionally exhausted". In short, burnout.

The piece goes on to describe a course at the Hunter–Bellevue School of Nursing in New York in which nurses are given the tools to develop a "resiliency plan". A fundamental component of this plan is learning how to write reflectively. These reflections can revolve around patients whose lives the nurses "...saved and those who have died, about workplace violence and bullying and medical error, about their personal experiences of love and divorce, pregnancy and miscarriage, immigration, intimate partner violence, illness, and death— in short, about their losses, struggles, and triumphs." 

While health administrators may not experience the same sort of emotional responses that occur in direct patient care, I'm willing to wager that they, too, are challenged by their "losses, struggles, and triumphs." If so, then perhaps it makes sense for us to help them understand the value and benefits from reflective writing. And to guide them towards how to best achieve this skill. 

I've been asking students in my courses to create and curate a "Reflective Learning Journal" for several years, although I'll admit that I don't think I've been as successful with this learning task as I'd like to be. The major barrier always seems to be that students presume the goal is to "write about what Dave wants me to write about", presuming that I am the sole audience for their writing product. I have tried to convince them that value of such writing comes when they consider themselves as the audience, not me – that the true value to the individual comes from the process of writing, not the words that end up on the page. I found it's a tough sell.

And so I'm curious – what are your thoughts?
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