The Florence Nightingale Approach

In an inspiring interview, Barbara Dossey, a pioneer in the holistic nursing and nurse coaching movements, highlighted the integral role nurses are playing in the transformation of global health.

Dossey is the author of many books, including Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer, which examines the Impact of Nightingale's life and work on modern nursing.

Dossey has over 50 years of experience in nursing, where she started out in the more tradition role of critical care and cardiovascular nursing before transitioning to holistic nurse coaching. She gained valuable insights into ways the profession could be improved, specifically developing the practice of empowering patient interactions within the scope of nursing care.

However, Dossey could see that effective delivery to the patient could not be possible if she could not have such personal, empowering conversations with herself. Through her own personal health journey in the 1960s, a time when alternative therapies were endorsed by few, Dossey used relaxation, imagery, and biofeedback to help treat not only her physical ailments but also to explore the mental and emotional aspects exacerbating them.

From this firsthand experience, Dossey began to teach her patients how to use their own strengths to build resilience, an important component to healing. As patients discover their personal resiliency in all four components—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual—they can look beyond the source of their pain, fear, or anxiety and find a deeper meaning to their personal health and well-being—mind, body and soul.

The caveat to this holistic approach is, as Dossey discovered for herself, that nurses must explore their own well-being before they can empower their patients to do so. They need to practice their healing ritual and be aware of any changes that occur. Dossey notes that as a profession, nursing has incredible potential to be at the forefront of this shift in healthcare thinking.

While there are still a large majority of “unhealthy” nurses needing various levels of change and behavior awareness, by embracing integrative practice, nurses can advance their knowledge, competencies, and skills. They can bring about a new age of patient interactions, active listening, nurse coaching, and self-reflection to ask the deeper questions and begin to catalyze sustaining care for patients’ whole health and well-being.