Parting Thoughts: 10 Lessons Learned from Florence Nightingale’s Life

The final post in a series by Susan Hassmiller, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Senior Adviser for Nursing, sent to us as dispatches from her summer vacation spent retracing Florence Nightingale’s influential career. The full series can be found by clicking here.  

My husband has called this trip a “game changer” for me, and indeed it has been.  I see things differently now, including our health care system . . . and the critical contributions that nurses are making, and need to continue making, to improve care for patients. Of course, I always knew this, but somehow this ups the ante for me—and I will use my new education to up the ante for nurses. I have learned so much, but let me share these 10 lessons I gleaned from Ms. Nightingale.


1. Never, ever stop learning.

A broad education in the arts and sciences helps with critical thinking and making important connections that lead to action. I saw how Florence used her knowledge of math, statistics, sanitation, religion, and architecture to put a holistic plan together to improve the systems that care for patients.

2. Ground yourself and your work in facts and evidence.

Make your case indisputable.  Everyone should do this . . . not just those who call themselves “researchers.”

3. Muster the courage to follow your convictions.

Step beyond what you think you can do.

4. Treat every person holistically.

Every person has […]

2026-05-07T12:08:10-04:00July 22nd, 2010|nursing history|10 Comments
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Scutari: A Blog Post Will Never Do Justice To This Visit

This is the second to last in a series of posts by Susan Hassmiller, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing, that chronicle her summer vacation spent retracing Florence Nightingale’s influential career.

Scutari was a “tragedy of epic proportions of which bureaucratic muddle and sheer human incompetence played the larger part, thrown in with a measure of bad luck.”

–Mark Bostridge, from his book, Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon

The Hospital: What Florence Experienced
It is almost incongruent that a woman who wrote more than 14,000 letters and 200 books said upon arriving at Scutari Hospital, a converted army barracks, that she was without words to describe what she saw. Of course, as time caught up with her, the words flowed quite freely. Death and mutilation surrounded her in this well-known deathtrap.  Her nurses slept (“in catnaps”) in cramped quarters. Men were cramped into rooms and spilled out into the long corridors as they lay on straw beds on cold stone floors. Attendants had to walk over the men who were, by Nightingale’s command, a requisite 18 inches apart. More men died than lived.

Nightingale hardly slept, took her meals by the spoonful, and spent most of her time caring for the men, overseeing the band […]

2016-11-21T13:16:28-05:00July 22nd, 2010|nursing research|4 Comments
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Searching for the Evidence? AJN Series Demystifies EBP

By Shawn Kennedy, AJN interim editor-in-chief

Trying to get evidence-based practice (EBP) implemented in your hospital or nursing home? Running into problems or just not quite sure how to proceed? Well, AJN has the answer.


EBP should be the basis for any clinical practice. Since last November, AJN has published a series of articles by the faculty at Arizona State University College of Nursing and Health Innovation’s Center for the Advancement of Evidence-Based Practice. Articles are published every other month and are designed to take the reader, step-by-step, towards implementing EBP. The current article describes the beginning steps to appraising the evidence; or go here to read the first article and follow in sequence.

Listen to a podcast with series leaders Bernadette Melnyk, PhD, RN, CPNP/PMHNP, FNAP, FAAN, and Ellen Fineout-Overholt, PhD, RN, FNAP, FAAN, the authors of Evidence-Based Practice in Nursing & Healthcare: A Guide to Best Practice. And we’ll have a second “Ask the Authors” call in November (check our home page for details after November 1).

If you’ve had problems or hit snags on your journey to EBP, e-mail me (shawn.kennedy@wolterskluwer.com) so we can address these issues on our next call.

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2017-05-27T10:32:54-04:00July 21st, 2010|Nursing|0 Comments
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Florence Comes to Constantinople…And I Come to Istanbul

By Sue Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Senior Adviser for Nursing (from an ongoing series of posts by Hassmiller, who’s spending her summer vacation retracing crucial steps in Florence Nightingale’s innovative career)

As I enter the city of Istanbul today, I am tired. Almost immediately I catch myself and remember that it took me just 3.5 hours to fly from London to Istanbul and it took Ms. Nightingale almost a month to sail here (Istanbul was called Constantinople at the time). She was sick most of the time, but resolute in her mission. I look around at the airport and see that all I come into contact with are standing upright, while those Nightingale came into contact with were mostly horizontal. […]

2016-11-21T13:16:30-05:00July 21st, 2010|Nursing|1 Comment
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Ms. Nightingale as an Applied Statistician

By Sue Hassmiller, PhD, RN, FAAN (latest in a series of posts by Hassmiller, who’s spending her summer vacation retracing crucial steps in Florence Nightingale’s innovative career)
 
Here at the home of Florence Nightingale, Embley Park (for more on Embley Park, see last week’s blog post), approximately 100 people have convened to study the impact of the “Lady with the Lamp.” The lady herself was multifaceted, and so is this crowd of scholars. There are nurse leaders, of course, but also museum curators, historians, educators, and biographers. They are all interested in their own piece, but also in how their piece fits into the bigger whole of her life. Today we heard Professor Thomas from the University of Southampton School of Business discuss her contributions as an applied statistician.
   

Representing mortality. Early in her life, Ms. Nightingale identified the need for hospitals and healthcare systems to collect and use data to improve care. She asked what use are statistics “if we don’t know what to make of them?” She is credited with developing the famous “coxcomb” illustration, which was a multidimensional way of depicting mortality rates. She used statistics at Scutari Hospital (also called Selimiye Barracks) in Turkey to guide her actions and used statistics and data in the London Times to convey […]

2016-11-21T13:16:32-05:00July 20th, 2010|health care policy, nursing history, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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