This week is National Nurse Practitioner Week, November 8 through 14. I have said it for years and I will keep saying it: becoming a nurse practitioner was the best decision I ever made. It is my calling.
When people ask me what makes nurse practitioners different, I don't start with prescribing or diagnosing. I start with where all of us came from. The bedside.
Before I was a nurse practitioner, I was a nurse
Every one of us was a nurse before we ever wrote an order. I spent mine in the ER and trauma.
Trauma nursing puts you in the room for the worst moments of people's lives. Life and death, in real time. The physicians are doing exactly what they need to do. They are moving fast, making the next critical decision, and often moving on to the next patient. The nurse is the one who stays.
Staying meant I was there when patients and families had the questions they didn't get to ask. When they were scared and didn't know what was happening. When they needed someone to explain it one more time, slower, in plain language.
What you learn when you stay
You learn things in that room no textbook teaches.
You learn to read a face. The patient who nodded along but didn't understand. The one who is too afraid to ask.
You learn when to stay quiet. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can offer is not more information. It is your hand on their shoulder.
You learn to stay steady in moments most people never want to be part of, so the person in the bed doesn't have to hold it alone.
I didn't know at the time that I was building a skill. I thought I was just doing my job.
Seeing the system from the patient's side
When I became a nurse practitioner, I brought all of it with me. My years at the bedside showed me what it is like to move through the medical system as a patient. The waiting. The rushed conversations. The questions that come up after the doctor has already left the room.
So patients tell me things. Frustrations they never got the chance to say to a doctor. Questions they have been carrying for weeks. Because I have been on their side of the room, I know how to answer them, and I know how to comfort them.
Trust is the skill
That is where trust comes from. Credentials matter, but they are not what makes a patient open up. Trust comes when a patient feels that you understand what this is like for them, because you have stood next to people going through it.
It is the skill I lean on most, in the exam room and in everything I have built since.
Why I started a primary care practice
All of this is why starting my direct primary care practice meant so much to me.
There is a shortage of primary care providers, and I see what that gap looks like up close. People skipping their screenings. People who feel fine and believe it will never happen to them. At my wellness center, I have met so many people who had no primary care provider at all, or who told me they get nothing out of the visits they do have.
I wanted to help close that gap. The time, the listening, the trust, everything I love about being a nurse practitioner, is the care I wanted to build a practice around.
To every nurse practitioner this week
To my fellow nurse practitioners: our bedside years are what make us special. We carry them into every visit, and they are a big part of why our patients trust us.
And if you are a nurse wondering whether becoming a nurse practitioner is for you, here is what I wish someone had told me sooner. What you are learning right now, at the bedside, is exactly what will make you good at it. So why can't you?
Happy NP Week.
