Greetings, everyone. I am so excited to debut “Musing of the great blue.” Like many of you, I am a nurse, parent, spouse, scholar and teacher. My husband and I are the proud parents of three terrific children, three crazy and athletic dogs, and one very fat shelter kitty, all of whom have given us unconditional love, loyalty and a reason to get up every morning. I thoroughly enjoy cardio kickboxing, hiking, biking, cooking and reading. I especially enjoy spending time with my family, friends and pets.
I have been a nurse for most of my adult life. From the early 1980s through the mid 1990s, I worked as a psychiatric nurse, specializing in adolescent violence prevention and addiction recovery. During those years, I worked with violent youth gangs, utilizing a primary prevention model to teach aggressive teens how to settle disputes with words instead of force and weapons. Our goal was to prevent minor incidents from escalating into potentially violent episodes.
My clinical-practice experience now frames my present-day program of research and supports strategies I have developed to foster civility in nursing education and practice. As a nurse educator, I have observed incivility between nursing faculty and students and have witnessed firsthand its troubling consequences. Uncivil behavior negatively impacts the learning environment and disrupts faculty-student relationships, causing turmoil and needless distress. In the practice setting, incivility is predictive of job dissatisfaction, decreased job performance, diminished employee health and increased turnover.
My consistent and comprehensive program of research has brought these issues to bear in a thoughtful, nonjudgmental manner and has stimulated national and international dialogue on these critical issues.
You may ask, Why does civility matter? In response, I invite you to read my article “Why civility matters,” recently published in Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL).
For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.
