Paper
Halls C & D (Indiana Convention Center)
Saturday, November 12, 2005
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Halls C & D (Indiana Convention Center)
Sunday, November 13, 2005
7:00 AM - 8:00 AM
Halls C & D (Indiana Convention Center)
Sunday, November 13, 2005
9:30 AM - 10:30 AM
This presentation is part of : Creative and Expressive Arts in Nursing
Wisdom in Healthcare: The Crafting of the Metaphor of Nurse as Artist
Ann M. Scanlon McGinity, PhD, RN, Chief Nurse Executive, The Methodist Hospital, Houston, TX, USA
Learning Objective #1: n/a
Learning Objective #2: n/a

The very real unspoken problem in healthcare has been our inability to match our intellectual and technological strides with our capacity to assure meaningful caring. The gap grows daily between the technology we can provide and the compassion that must equally match those achievements. Complex moral problems emerge and present themselves for which we look for legal and 'right' answers: not common sense and heart-felt ones. As knowledge grows, so also does the imperative to seek the wisdom of our nursing profession in giving voice to what isn't being spoken to: what is not said. Nurses have woven their stories for us through the ages: they present their struggles, their sufferings, their successes. Each of us has both fashioned our own unique stories as well as has been entrusted with our colleagues' stories. They have served to provide us with both a legacy and a responsibility to those who have sought to follow. This poster will present how the work of nursing, when viewed as art and captured by the pen, allows for the crafting of a new and far more creative self-image for both the artist and the work environment: the image of nurse as storyteller. As nursing must rely on its grand collective wisdom to produce people of character and gratitude for the call to caring, this presentation will share one way in which the challenges of giving voice to our work may sustain us as we journey through changing healthcare environments.