Whether you’re a nurse practitioner, nurse educator, researcher, nurse entrepreneur, or a nurse in the ICU or ED, creating a nursing career legacy is an important concept to consider. No matter what your place in the nursing ecosystem, leaving something of yourself will help bring meaning to your career and fill you with a sense of accomplishment.
A Relational Legacy
For many nurse clinicians, the nurse-patient relationship is at the center of their work. Some nurses focus on relational and emotional intelligence throughout their careers, and their entire reason for being is primarily driven by creating strong, healthy therapeutic relationships with patients and their families.
You may find yourself wholly satisfied by the excellent relationships you develop with your patients. Being a loving and compassionate guide to women undergoing breast cancer treatment may be the pinnacle of your work as a nurse — there may be nothing else you want to do and nowhere else you’d like to be.
The level of satisfaction that can be derived from walking patients through their journey may be all you need to feel you’ve lived a life worth living. Your heart may be filled with the fact that your patients carry a piece of you with them as they move into a world beyond the hospital. That is certainly a worthy nursing legacy.
Apart from patient care, professional relationships can also be a place where you build a legacy. You may enjoy mentoring new nurses, serving as a preceptor, or providing other forms of support to your colleagues. Some of us thrive on professional relationships, and part of your legacy may be the positive impact you’ve had on your colleagues.
A Clinical Legacy
In the clinical world, patient care and nurse-patient relationships are the central focus for some. There are also nurses whose bold thinking and action occur in relation to clinical outcomes and clinical practice. You may be an astute clinician whose understanding of pathophysiology is a source of knowledge for your peers, or you may be an advanced practice nurse who thrives on clinical puzzles.
Your clinical legacy may come in the form of clinical research, drafting white papers, creating new workflow patterns, or even inventing products that make nurses’ lives easier.
Your clinical legacy may impact your unit and a small group of nurses, or perhaps you’ll make a mark on the entire nursing profession. The sky’s the limit.
The Legacy of Nursing Leadership
Leadership is relational, and the power of a nurse leader’s legacy can be far-reaching. As a nurse leader, you may focus on your unit or facility, using your influence to impact those with whom you work closely or within your organization.
On the other hand, some nurse leaders spread their influence much more widely. Some nurse theorists use their ideas to create new movements within the profession. And some nurse leaders forge new pathways for nurses to pursue their dreams and passions.
Leadership can have a profound influence close to home, as well as a significant impact worldwide. Florence Nightingale comes to mind as a nurse leader whose impact continues through the centuries. Your legacy doesn’t have to be the size of Nightingale’s to be important; it just needs to be important to you.
Informational and Educational Legacies
The nursing profession would never have risen to its current level of recognition and professional accomplishment without nurses who were dedicated to educating others. Nursing education is the heart of our efforts to expand and enrich the profession, and it is essential to our profession to produce the next generation of nurse leaders and clinicians.
The potential impact of the legacy of an effective nurse educator can’t be overstated. If you’re a nursing professor who spends decades educating and inspiring nursing students to embrace the profession with dedication and professionalism, that’s a powerful legacy.
Nurse journalists, writers, and podcasters educate nurses and non-nurses in various ways, including capturing their professional lives to inspire both nurses and the general public. Nurse journalists contribute to the body of literature that represents nurses in the printed (or digital) word. Books, magazine articles, blog posts, videos, and podcasts by nurses are all part of the profession’s informational legacy.
An Organizational Legacy
Some nurses remain an integral part of an organization for years, becoming an increasingly important facet of what that organization represents globally.
Your nursing legacy may spring from your contributions to the life of the place where you work each day. Whether you participate in research, patient care, nurse education, information technology, administration, or executive leadership, you can also leave a lasting organizational legacy. Whether you pass through a healthcare facility or agency for one year or twenty years, the significance of your impact could be immeasurable.
Your Career, Your Legacy
Your nursing career legacy is yours to create. Your legacy may have more to do with patients than with other nurses, or more with research and theory than clinical practice. The what and how are entirely up to you.
Every career can have a legacy, although some are quieter than others in terms of the splash they make. Your legacy can be fed and watered throughout your nursing career, so consider what you would like to create and set about putting the pieces in place to leave the legacy that means the most to you.
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