Morning Vitals: Looking Forward to Personal Nursing Career Challenges and Opportunities in 2020

A couple of weeks ago, I took a look back at my nursing life in 2019 (see here). As we cross the threshold into 2020, I now take a look ahead toward the coming year and discuss some goals for Morning Vitals.

Overall, I plan to take several steps to advancing my nursing career in 2020, some of which involve clinical practice. Sometime this year, I hope to become certified in wound and ostomy care. I’d also like to begin as a pre-licensure clinical adjunct faculty for a nursing program. Staying true to my roots in research, I’d also like to support my organization through quality improvement studies.

Apart from clinical practice, I plan to solidify the online presence of Morning Vitals, both through the WordPress blog and the Twitter account. Beyond these venues, I’d like to explore other social media opportunities. However, before I settle on which platforms to use, I’ll need to explore further the real potential of each given my current commitments. I never like to engage in an activity with the goal of mediocrity.

For the most part, I’ve posted to the blog approximately once a week. For most of 2019, this has been about all I could manage, given my work and personal commitments. However, I have so many more ideas than I can work into a single post per week, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of the topics most important to me. Not only that, but I suspect the appeal of Morning Vitals will extend beyond a single special interest group who can track with me on just the topics I’ve chosen once a week.

What does all that mean, you ask? Well, the short answer is that I hope to increase my posting frequency to multiple posts a week on average. I attempted this earlier this year, just as I was getting started with my certification, and I had to back off. Part of that was due to the self-imposed pressure of quality posts. I dislike reading drivel, and I assume my partners in conversation have the same inclination. In retrospect, I see that posting more than once a week will be the best course of action.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned the topics of greatest emphasis thus far on Morning Vitals, which include community in nursing, gender diversity, and men in nursing. As my circle of conversation expands, I’d like to introduce additional related topics. As you might expect, this may very well require an additional post or two each week.

Most of my audience engagement thus far has been through Twitter in the context of my conference coverage. I hope to continue that this year by attending at least a couple of nursing-related conferences. As in 2019, I look forward to live-tweet coverage, and I may even be able to include some interviews and/or polls.

There are more ideas in my mind than I can mention right now, but I hope to look back at the end of 2020 and see that I accomplished at least some of the major objectives I laid out for the year. I’m certainly looking forward the coming year, knowing I’ll be very busy and, I hope, productive. I hope you’ll join me on Morning Vitals and add your voice to the conversation.