Caution: Innovation in Progress

I’m home again. The day after a trip away can be a bit anticlimactic, however I determined that I would maintain my pace of the last few days. My main concern has been my blog post tonight, which I did have on my computer and almost ready to post ~ only a few moments ago. One of my programs froze the screen forcing me to shut the darn thing down. So I lost what had been done.  Breathe. Start again. The interesting thing about opinions is that they never really disappear ~ only the word-crafting.

Communication, my theme for this month, has been carefully snugged into my blog posts. Communication with distant and dear family and friends, memories and the past, our environment and with ourselves to connect us universally. And difficulty with communication ~ what blocks there may be for effective communication. What was I going to write tonight with this loss of focus?

Today has been filled with CBC radio while reorganizing laundry, then a movie and coffee with a friend, getting vegetables from the garden and a bit of shopping. The movie, The Butler, was a fascinating story about the disconnected communication between blacks and whites in the U.S. through presidents from Eisenhower to the present day.

What really peaked my interest and stayed with me throughout today was the interview I heard this morning on White Coat Black Art hosted by Dr. Brian Goldman on CBC Radio. Dr. Goldman interviews health care professionals, patients and their families about their experiences in the Canadian health care systems. Dr. Goldman is an Emergency Room physician who reports from his ‘side of the gurney’. White Coat Black Art can be found at http://www.cbc.ca/whitecoat/index.html

His topic today, interesting and important, was “Turning Patients Into Health-Care Partners”. Sitting up and paying attention, I listened with interest to this interview about an ‘innovative’ approach to patient centered care that is being rolled out in Kingston General Hospital. I must admit I was a bit indignant when I heard that this patient centered care was innovative. The patient centered care approach seems only innovative for the present hospital systems. Nurses for generations have been instructed in this form of care, however have not always been able to follow instructions. With technological advances and budgetary constraints the numbers of nurses at the bedside has not always kept pace with these advances that can and do take the focus off of bedside patient care and human contact. In early 1970's, I heard a new young nurse say:  'Nursing is just a technological job.'  I was stunned but now recognize her quite astute observation. Nurses need to be brought out from the medication rooms, from behind the desk at computers, and from the ever present pieces of technology to walk with our patients through their hospital stay, providing them with health care teaching that is required for their health condition ~ a human equation. Nursing can better provide them direction to outpatient clinics specific to their physical and/or mental health condition. Hopefully this is occuring more often than I think it is.

Splitting off of duties by establishing and developing social work departments, Registered Dietitians, Physical Therapists, and Occupational Therapists has been valuable as these professionals provide important services. Each of these departments definitely has required development and expansion. A deficit that I see for these departments is that they are often Monday to Friday daytime hours only, limiting patient contact and communication with other shifts and with nurses that provide a continuum of care. The ability of any patient to function in evening and nighttime hours is witnessed by the nursing staff that cover these shifts. Communication is between all of these departments, the physician and, last but definitely not least, the patient. Family participation, which is to be encouraged, is often in the evening hours.  

Care must be taken with innovation. 

“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. 
New ideas must use old buildings.”

~ Steven Johnson, 
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Blatant Bias for Food and Coffee

The trip is over, experiences with friends and family are safely in memory (or more safely in digital images!). But I need to add just a bit more. I had a couple of hours left this morning before leaving for home this afternoon. The prairie sky was clear, clear blue. The sun shone warm and bright. I walked downtown for a last looksee in my home city. Sitting outside in the sun with a medium latte, I wrote in my journal about what this blog was to be tonight.

Communication tonight is my blatant bias, and definite preference, for three businesses in Regina involving three of my favorite activities: a good cup of cafe latte, food, and cooking. When or if you travel to Regina make sure to visit these locations.

For a great cup of coffee:

Atlantis Coffee Co. on the corner of Hamilton St. and Victoria Ave.

www.atlantiscoffee.com

For a beautifully presented and delicious meal (and great coffee):

Flip Eatery beside Atlantis on Hamilton St.

www.fliprestaurant.com

For interesting specialty foods and spices for your kitchen:

Salt Food Boutique on the other side of Atlantis on Victoria Ave.

https://www.facebook.com

“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”

~ George Bernard Shaw

Tunneling through Past and Present

On this second last day of my Regina vacation, I had opportunity to visit Regina General Hospital again ~ this time to accompany a friend on an errand. Each time I have returned this week, I have been looking for an old and dear friend. A friend who was with me at the beginning of my nursing career. I have pouted and fussed a bit about all the changes that have been wrought over the years but have not really spoken deeply to myself about what all the fuss was about.

We entered the hospital today from the St. John’s Street entrance, behind the hospital that I knew so well.  The lovely wing shown in this picture is to the right of that entrance and apparently has auditoriums housed inside. Down one of the myriad of halls are yellowed photographs of the hospital in it’s various incarnations.  Pointing to the Nurses Residence and the window of the room I shared in First Year Nursing in 1965-66, there were also sidewalks that curved down either side of a large lawn to the circular parking lot. I remembered walking down that sidewalk with my classmates in our uniforms or, if in our street clothes, meeting friends in the parking lot to go to the Crescent Tea Room for lunch, to the beach or just a walk downtown.

There was the DVA (Department of Veterans Affairs) wing that housed 72 beds on one unit for our military veterans. It was the first floor of one of those units that I did my very first bed bath ~ on a man!  The DVA wing extended from the original hospital that was built in 1909 with solariums on each floor so patients could be taken to the sun while recovering. More wings sprouted from the other side of the old hospital, it's original entrance arch ensconced inside the present building. 

What the photographs couldn’t show was the tunnel from the Nurses Residence to the Hospital and the tunnel from the Hospital to the Munroe Wing ~ both closed and filled in.

My communication with these memories tunneling through feelings and old photographs opened a tiny ache in my heart. This random collection of bricks and mortar has changed the face of the hospital where young women trained for nursing careers. There has been an unintentional erasure of the lives of anyone who lived, learned and worked to develop a career. It has felt more like our pasts have been pushed out of being to accomodate our vehicles and our ever growing technology, with little honour for the past. I do know however, that inside the rearranged bricks and mortar blocks, health care of patients continues. Just with a few differences in the tools that are used and placement of buildings.

“Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.”

~ Marcus Aurelius

Spans through Time

Over coffee today conversation ebbed and flowed

memories of school friends and growing up

spiraling through life’s directions til today

Cultural and religious, political and economic strata of society communicate looping rules around each member defining who, what and how to befriend in this life

Bridges are built to span each strata of the adult world.

Children, unaware of any need for bridges to even be built,

play and argue, laugh and learn together on the shores of life.

“Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity,

 their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”

~ Aldous Huxley

Ending with Art

A much quieter day awaited me today but not without interest!

Leisurely morning with coffee and visits, gave way to a brief stroll to Regina General Hospital, now barely recognizable to my friends and I. The grand Nurses Residence has been long banished for a paved parking lot. Old hospital wings where we first tried and tested new nursing skills gone as well.

Shifting gears later in the afternoon, my sister Kate and I went ‘erranding’ (is that a word?), then to supper. Once more ~ lots of wonderful visiting, this time reminiscing about family and mutual friends.

Early evening, prairie sky darkening more quickly as fall approaches, took Kate and I to SLATE Fine Art Gallery for a performance by Joseph Sanchez, from Santa Fe, New Mexico. A mixed media artist, he performed readings along with projected images from the reserve where he grew up, all backgrounded by Johnny Cash singing ballads of Indian life. At first oddly troubling because of the simultaneous visual and auditory mix, the title became clear as the show progressed: “Who do You Listen To?" This performance communicated 'Messages of Assimilation, Appropriation and Apathy' that continue to this day.

The walls of this small gallery are presently decorated with art work of First Nations artists from across Canada ~ Vancouver Island to Saskatchewan and Manitoba to Quebec; from Concordia University, Gordon First Nation and an artist originally from the U.K. Art work of Joe Fafard gallops across the prairie sky on the front edge of the building housing SLATE Fine Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan. 

All in all it was a good day.

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward 

appearance of things, but their inward significance.”

~ Aristotle

A Gathering - The 40th Annual Alumnae Dinner RGH School of Nursing

The tables were laid with linens and silver cutlery. Water glasses filled and crockery all placed just so. From outside the vast dining room, a hum and buzz rippled, punctuated with laughter and surpised greetings, growing louder and filling the room as nurses from across Canada, from the United States and even two from Africa entered chatting and visiting with classmates not seen for weeks or months and, very many, for years.

From the Nursing Class of 1948 through the intervening years to 1972 (many of the years graduating two classes), nurses, both retired and many still working, returned to Regina, gathering in this dining room to meet and greet, laugh and reminisce, and catch up with changes both personally and in the profession of nursing.

All had been nursing students, young prairie girls learning to perform tasks at the same time providing the healing power of touch. Some stayed on at the Regina General Hospital School of Nursing and became instructors for those that young nurses that followed.

The evening’s speakers spoke of communicating nursing’s message farther afield:

~ a nurse author, a graduate of ‘the other’ school of nursing in Regina, writes about histories of nursing and of schools of nursing in Saskatchewan

~ an international nurse educator, a graduate of the Class of 1963 RGH School of Nursing, aids in developing nursing education in Africa and Cuba.

In those times when the nursing profession may begin to seem bit tarnished, I only need attend with this laughing continuum of mothers and grandmothers, sisters and aunts, family members and community members to know that I am one of a legion of truly caring women (not to mention very mishievous).

An Aside: There were no young men in RGH School of Nursing classes. Young men, for many years now, have been welcomed into this profession adding dimension and depth with their knowledge and caring. I have had the privilege of working with many of them (some not so young anymore) and have been proud to call them my colleagues in the nursing profession.

“The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that 

they can grow separately without growing apart.”

~ Elizabeth Foley

Keep on Walking

We will all keep on walking through our lives.

Whatever they bring, we can always revisit that first three years.

Communicated to us by instructors, sometimes from the same School of Nursing, were clinical lessons about many things young nurses no longer learn or use:

mustard plasters and linseed poultices

preparing special diets for diabetics and heart patients

standing up when physicians entered the nurses station!

back rubs with hs care

mitered corners on crisp cotton sheets

just at the cusp of using glass syringes with re-usable needles we learned about new plastic syringes and disposable needles,

glass thermometers with mercury infills,

sphygmomanometers and stethoscopes,

starched cotton uniforms and caps soon to be replaced by pantsuits of polyester, caps soon to disappear from sight,

stainless steel equipment from bedpans to suture trays ~

and each task learned was for the care and respect of our patient from the neonate struggling to begin life, on through the life span to the very elderly at death's door.

We will all keep on walking through our own lives hopefully having gained bit more wisdom from the diverse paths we have chosen and followed.

Whatever they bring, we can always revisit that first three years with a smiles and tears.........

“There are no days more full than those we go back to.”

~ Colum McCann, Zoli