Touch : The Most Important Role of the Nurse in Caring for a Patient

This book is a shorter version of my first "To Nurse Means to Nurture" that I have written to put special emphasis on "touch" and how it applies to nurses. First, I ran into nurses that said, "It's not in my job description to comfort my patients" in the past 3 years. When I proved them wrong, they said, "Yes, but that does not include physical contact. No hugging and no touching. It's not in our job description." I wrote this book to show you that the direct opposite is true. You will see references to "touch" and "touch therapy" and "comfort" used several times over in various college textbooks of nursing, especially Fundamentals of Nursing 7th Edition, Potter and Perry, Mosby Elsevier, 2009 and my notes on nurse education videos I have seen with my own eyes that actually show female nurses in action "touching" both male and female middle aged patients who are not dying but just having procedures done by "rubbing their heads", "holding their hands", "patting their shoulders", and "rubbing their shoulders" to comfort them through needle sticks and procedures. St. Jude's Hospital Commercials also show their female nurses doing all of these same things for both their male and female kid patients as well as "hugging" them and "putting their arm around them" in addition to the hand holds, head rubs, and shoulder pats. They do it all. The Health Care Career Vision DVD from 2008 says, "Nurses need to be comfortable "touching" their patients if they are to work with them. Fundamentals of Nursing 7th Edition, Potter and Perry, Mosby Elsevier 2009 says this very same thing. It continually encourages touch and touch therapy and says that the "patient's needs take priority over the nurses' needs and the patient's needs are to be met above that of the nurses." It constantly tells them to comfort them and touch them as well as does 'Basic Psychophysiologic Nursing from 1979 and a few other sources. So, does the AARP magazine in an article about Dr. Meir trying to change the face of the medical community to make them more of a palliative care team and comfort their patients rather than treat them like objects, and the article from "The Power of Touch" from December 2015-January 2016s edition. I already had dictionary and encyclopedia references to nurses comforting their patients, and "to nurse means to nurture" in the dictionary. Because these nurses insist that comfort "does not" include physical contact, I have included dozens of comments on "Touch" and "Touch Therapy" from these sources and others. Other videos also showed nurses hugging patients and rubbing their heads and holding their hands. There are even a slew of pictures on the internet of Nursing Hugging their Patients when you type that in or comforting their patients if you type that in. It's not anything new. They've always done it, and what makes them think they haven't I don't know. You're not a bunch of professionals from a firm taking care of robots, you are nurses and you are the caretakers of those in your care and you are the "mother surrogates" of the patients in your care and you are to show them the same affection and attention as their own mother would as stated by Lisa Newton who defends the traditional role of the nurse. I hope this solves this dilemma of this "no touch" nursing philosophy everybody has and makes them see the light to the true meaning of nursing. Please read my book and be enlightened as to what the profession of nursing really entails. Thanks. Your friend, Brian Gene Evans