Nurstory is offering a supportive and safe online space to tell and share your stories of systemic and interpersonal racism in nursing - moments when we experienced or confronted or resisted or were complicit in racism in our nursing practice.
Since COVID-19 and the layered stressors stemming from systemic oppression and racism that affects so many Nurse-Family Partnership nurses and their patients, Nurstory began offering a series of weekly reflective storytelling webinars.
In 2019, Nurstory partnered with Nurse-Family Partnership (https://www.nursefamilypartnership.org/), a organization that empowers first-time moms to transform their lives and create better futures for themselves and their babies. We all came together to remember and crystallize stories of how and why they do the work they do and what care really means in the contexts in which they work.
In 2018, Nursing educator Kristen Jones had a plan for research on compassion in nursing. The research had three phases, with the final phase being a digital story workshop with nurse educators. The teams from Lakehead University and from Storycenter/Nurstory facilitated a workshop for nine nurses who made stories reflecting on compassion in their practice and their lives.
The Nurstory team is helping the faculty at Florida Atlantic University to integrate digital storytelling into their “caring science” nursing curriculum. Faculty developed lesson plans to have students reflect on stories made by other nurses as well as make their own.
For the past seven years, Nurstory has been working with first The Center for Medical Transport Research and now The Medevac Foundation to help crash and near-miss survivors figure out why nurses (and pilots and medics) often don't know what safety looks like.
Nurstory worked with UMass Amherst's College of Nursing to help nurses identify and capture how and why Health as a Human Right. We're continuing to work with UMass on the annual Seedworks Social Justice Symposium.
Statistics only go so far. Through a workshop facilitated by StoryCenter nurses developed stories about the relationships they have with work and health as they age.
Perhaps we are made from the stories we carry. For forensic nurses, then, this is at times a harrowing place in which to live. The workshop helped participants process vicarious/secondary trauma and externalizing those narratives in digital stories.
The very first Nurstory workshop happened in 2008 with the University of Colorado Doctoral Program in Nursing. Known worldwide for its focus on caring and reflective practice, Sue Hagedorn and Vicki Erickson, both faculty at that time, brought together nursing faculty from the program for the workshops.