By Richard Freedberg, RN, MSN, MPA

My family is already asking me for advice! What should I do? Hmmm, only part of the way through nursing school and you are already being hit up for free healthcare advice. Anyone else out there running into this type of situation? Absolutely! This is a common circumstance.

Think about your own experiences. There is a certain nice guy with construction experience in my family who saved me from disaster when I was doing a home project. Another nephew with stellar tiling skills helped with a bathroom. You know the drill: We all seek help from people who we know, who we trust, and we try to help when we can. The only way we can all safely and successfully make it through life is together. But what about nursing care? Isn’t that different?

On one level, it isn’t. Isn’t nursing nothing more than a defined knowledge base, a set of skills, and some basic critical thinking used to implement those skills? Sure sounds similar to tiling the bathroom to me. However, tiling the bathroom without the requisite know-how and skills is not something you want to try on a whim. (You need to trust me there, but that is a whole other conversation!) In the same way, you don’t want to enter into a nursing relationship with someone unless you one, know everything you need to know and two, plan to do it right. Why don’t we consider each of those conditions for just a minute?

First, let’s examine the question of knowledge. Obviously (or hopefully!), you will have more nursing knowledge as you progress through your curriculum. Let’s insert an example here: A family member comes up to you and says, “My heart feels fast, could you listen to it?” If you are in the first semester, you might hear the lub-dub of each beat and determine the rate to be 130 beats/min. In a later semester, you might discern tachycardia but with an S3. After some graduate study, the nurse practitioner might also detect a dangerous diastolic murmur that warrants immediate assessment and intervention. The point is we all need to have some sense of the boundaries to our knowledge.

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