Nursing Our Healer's Heart: A Recovery Guide for Nurse Trauma & Burnout

'...radically revealing and beautifully unfolding in its healing message to all nurses. The straightforward writing and illustrations, combined with depth of scholarship, bring the work and world of nursing to a new global community of wisdom for heart-centered caring-healing. Every nurse can heal from just reading this book, being mentored back to one's healing heart.' Jean Watson, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, FAAN, LL (AAN) Founder Watson Caring Science Institute

The nursing profession is in crisis. Within a decade, the world will have just over half the number of nurses it needs. The global nursing workforce has experienced mass, complex trauma secondary to healthcare system inadequacies and a global pandemic. Traumatized and burned out nurses are leaving their roles or the profession in unprecedented numbers. Those who remain are stretched to or beyond their capacity. While system-level strategies aim to address this crisis, none of them consider nurse traumatization and its impact upon patient safety, outcomes, and quality of care. We cannot wait for health systems to prioritize nurse safety. Nurses can and must come together as a global community to heal through avoidable and unavoidable nurse-specific traumatization while partnering with healthcare leaders to usher in a new era of nursing.

This book, through an actionable framework, guides nurses in healing the traumas and hardships they've endured as individuals and nursing communities. Grounded in the sciences of unitary caring, integrative nursing, neurophysiology, and transpersonal neurobiology, this book supports nurses in restoring their healers' heart as they come together to address the deep trauma, burnout, attrition, and presenteeism that are central to the nursing crisis. Nurses will learn the language of their nervous system and how to navigate it as a foundational practice to support professional wellbeing. Each nurse will discover their unique innate care plan, which will guide their healing and co-healing with other nurses. By embracing the healing and practices offered in this book, nurses will learn how to support their nervous system regulation so they can thrive instead of survive in practice. Working from their healed scars instead of their open wounds, nurses can effectively lead sustainable organizational change and health care reforms that prioritize nurse safety and professional wellbeing.