by Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been working steadily to maintain this blog, which I’ve called Morning Vitals. Thus far, I’ve managed to add a post each week for a total of 33 including this one. At this point, I’d like to pause to describe more of what I hope to accomplish with Morning Vitals.
I began this blog out of a desire to find or build a community among my nursing colleagues around certain ideas I find desperately needed and tragically neglected within nursing. Some of these ideas are related to the very nature of health care in general and of nursing specifically. Other ideas have to do with nursing education, shared governance, gender diversity in nursing, spiritual care, and nursing culture, among others.
I don’t claim to be an expert on these topics–yet. However, because of my personal and work life experiences, I do believe I have a relatively rare and unique point of view on them. I’m always at work to develop greater understanding in these areas, and ultimately I hope to become less rare and unique as a community grows around discussion of these ideas.
It’s been a long time since I’ve maintained a blog consistently, and most of my writing in recent years has been scholarly writing in research or academic writing while in nursing school. I hope readers will forgive me for the complexity of subject matter on this blog. My intention is never to obscure, never to “muddy the waters” with language, but to choose precision over the all-too-easy assumption that everyone in the conversation agrees on the definitions of the terms used.
It’s a paradox, in my mind, that this blog is directed simultaneously toward every nurse and toward nurse leaders. It’s directed toward every nurse because I long for a day when nurses generally will understand and embrace great ideas, to the betterment of health care and society in general. At present, few nurses are interested in these ideas, so nurse leaders are a necessary focus.
As I continue to produce content for Morning Vitals, I’ll be exploring ways to increase the range of topics covered and cover them to an appropriate depth. The original vision for this blog involved both news and commentary as well as essays, product and literature reviews, and original research. I was never under the impression I could do justice to all of these with once-a-week posts, and I now believe I’m situated to expand my content offerings.
Starting this week, I’d like to increase my update frequency to at least twice-a-week publishing of specific types of posts in addition to occasional posts that may take me beyond two posts per week. In addition, I will soon be adding pages, including at a minimum broad topical pages, a resource page, and a contact form. Beyond this blog, I will continue to refine my use of Twitter and possibly other social media platforms to increase engagement with Morning Vitals.
I hope readers will be patient with me as I try to sustain these developments. As a married father of four working full-time in acute care and juggling extensive personal commitments, some weeks are easier than others to survive. However, in my opinion, people–including patients, nurses, other health care professionals, and even those with no relationship with health care–are worth the effort.
