Starting Off Right with Morning Vitals

Good morning, and welcome to Morning Vitals! As this is my initial post, I’d like to describe my motivation and goals for this blog.

Morning Vitals aims to fill certain voids I’ve experienced in my nursing education and career. In nursing school, my textbooks and professors mentioned certain important names, theories, and models in nursing. We discussed them briefly during class and were tested on some of them. However, other than this cursory treatment in the fundamentals course and one or two others, there was little about nursing school to impart a sense of value to what was clearly an extensive background of history and philosophy of nursing.

My career has only underscored the neglect of this background, but the void doesn’t exist in nursing exclusively. Nursing is a second career for me, my first one being life science research, including some experience in education. For a variety of spiritual and philosophical reasons, I love communal meaning-making of precisely the type that seems conspicuously absent from my experience of all of these fields.

On the practical side, I want to know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, and I always seek greater insight into the process. It’s fulfilling to practice with excellence, and that includes both technical expertise and ethical integrity. In twenty-first century professional life, people are frequently forced into no-win situations with conflicting expectations. I examine my nursing life through the same spiritual and philosophical lenses as every other domain of my life, seeking wholeness. Judging by many conversations I’ve had with colleagues in nursing, I know I’m not the only one longing for that wholeness in nursing.

So, I freely admit there’s a self-serving aspect of this blog—as there should be. Many fellow nurses have asked my opinions on a variety of nursing-related topics, and I’ve always enjoyed the exchanges that follow. I hope readers will find my content interesting and insightful, and I hope to contribute to more thoughtful and fulfilling nursing practice for myself and others.

So, what would you like to discuss?