Holistic nursing offers an incredible opportunity for positive change

The interactions in health care can be brief and technical. What symptoms is the patient in bed one exhibiting? What medication does the patient in bed two need? What treatment is required for the patient in bed three?

The information is acquired and documented, the medication is dispensed, the treatment is completed and — when the unit is full — it’s quickly on to the next. To be a nurse is to be busy, always in demand.

{mosads}Yet, amid the hustle from one patient to another the patient can inadvertently feel broken apart as if they were a list of fractured bones or undiagnosed symptoms, a surgery waiting to happen instead of a person with fears, aspirations and hopes and an innate desire to heal. It can have profoundly negative impacts, both making a patient feel objectified and unheard, while also making a nurse disconnect from his or her work.

Holistic nursing offers an incredible opportunity for positive change. If nurses were to step back and take a breath, center, and learn what is important to and what meaning this illness has to the person in the hospital gown, if our hospitals were to actively support nurses in the implementation of holistic nursing practices, we would see a benefit not just to the patients, but also to the nurses themselves.

Holism is, at its core, about connection: you cannot separate the body from the mind or the spirit or emotion. In that way, holistic nursing is also about connection, about totality. You don’t just treat the symptoms of a disease you treat the whole person.

That is one of the primary reasons holistic nursing practices could have a huge influence if implemented in hospitals. What might a nurse miss about the important factors impacting a person’s health and recovery not because they’re not asking the right medical questions, but because they’re only focusing on the illness or disease?

A person’s social support, their health practices, family lifestyle and illness patterns, personality traits, and social, structural and cultural factors are all integral to their health and healing. Holistic nursing focus on nurses building relationships with their patients and families. Doing so enables nurses to put the patient first, to ask the significant questions that will help a patient feel less anxious and open up.

Those conversations lead directly into the second main benefit holistic nursing would have if made mainstream in hospitals. By connecting with patients on a more human level, nurses have a chance to go beyond treatment toward prevention. It creates a real opportunity to have impactful conversations with people about the lifestyle patterns that are or aren’t helping them live healthy lives, about stress management and proper rest and exercise and nutrition.

Health is about so much more than medications and medical interventions.  Holistic nursing practices focus on balance, integration and harmony. The emphasis shifts from living longer to living better, from medical treatment only to a person’s own natural healing capacity and wellbeing.

That shift also helps to rectify a power imbalance that can, in some cases, negatively impact a person’s health.  Not infrequently, patients are passive: the healthcare provider handles their health care and they accept whatever recommendations are prescribed.

But holistic nursing helps empower a patient to take active responsibility for his or her own treatment and care. But here the patient becomes a partner. A nurse gets to know the patient as a person, helps them figure out how their personal choices and relationships are affecting them, what steps they need to take in their own lives to improve their health and healing.

Holistic nursing serves also as an important reminder that health isn’t just for patients. Nursing is an incredibly demanding profession. It requires your best physically and mentally, but may also drain you emotionally. Practicing self-care is key to making sure that a nurse remains healthy, balanced, and well equipped to do his or her job. The benefit is clear not just by the improved emotional well-being of the nurse, but also by the renewed vitality he or she is able to bring to patients.

Healing has multiple facets. You need medicine, but you also need warmth, compassion and caring. It’s abundantly clear that what affects the patient affects the nurse and vice versa. By implementing holistic nursing practices, we have a real opportunity have a positive impact on

Carla Mariano developed the Bachelor of Science Holistic Nursing Program at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine and is the President of the American Holistic Nurses Association.