We commit ourselves to work diligently.

We’d hope that all nurses are committed to what they do, but what does it really mean? Being a nurse is not purely transactional, so we really need to be committed professionals don’t we?

When you tell people you’re a nurse, one of the first things they say is: “You must be so dedicated – you need so much commitment to be a nurse”. Commitment is more than the quality of being truly dedicated to something.

Yes, we get paid to do what we do, but there’s something about commitment – that emotional attachment to being a nurse – that takes doing our job to a whole other level. Underneath the tasks, the thing that goes right through the middle of nursing like words through a stick of rock is a commitment to making things better. Commitment is to us is about striving for continuous improvement, constantly looking at things, and exploring ways of doing them differently.

If we don’t have this desire to make things better then at best they’ll stay as they are, but at worst, they’ll start to deteriorate.

Being a nurse never leaves us; it starts from the minute we go into training and stays with us our whole life. You don’t stop being a nurse when we take off our uniform; you’re always a nurse. From the very first day that we put on our nursing uniform, we’re telling the world that we chose caring as a career. That’s a pretty amazing feeling.
And it doesn’t finish when we retire – nursing skills are skills for life.
It’s not just the clinical skills we focus on but the interpersonal skills, the caring skills, the logical thinking skills, the problem-solving skills, the analytical skills – everything that we are as a nurse comes together into a beautiful package of skills for life.