n Editorial: Roles

n eDITorIAl Trust

Children’s author George MacDonald (1824–1905) wrote, “To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.” This issue of the Journal contains articles in which each central theme involves trust. As nurses, we may take for granted that our profession is regularly considered to be among America’s most trusted professions. How does this trusted status operate in our day-to-day work? What do patients and families gain through therapeutic, trust-based relationships with nurses? Words such as confidence, faith, energy, assurance, and safekeeping come to mind. There is power in trust.

Students invest time and finances on accredited academic programs to gain entry, through licensure, into the healthcare workforce as registered nurses. In “Nursing Students’ Experiences on NCLEX-RN Preparation” the author demonstrates how addressing the unique learning styles of students strengthens a student’s chance to successfully pass the NCLEX-RN examination. Accreditation, which requires adequate NCLEX-RN pass rates, is a public and professional affirmation of trust in a school to provide nursing education, according to standards established by the nursing academic community. In this way, nursing upholds its contract with society to provide the public with adequately trained and competent nurses. Utilizing educational practices that incorporate students’ learning styles enables the nursing program to fulfill assurances to both students and accreditation body.

In “Nurses Unions Can Help Reduce Stress, Burnout, Depression, and Compassion Fatigue, Part 4: Promoting Quality Nursing Care Through Better Self-Care Pilot Study Results,” the element of trust is activated at many levels. Peer leaders learned from NYSNA educators about the potential for self-care techniques to reduce workplace stress for themselves and among their recruited peers. Trust, placed in their union, colleagues, and themselves empowers nurses to risk change and potential failure. Nurse peers willingly depend on their informal leaders’ plan and formal leaders’ support for a program in which application of self-care methods improves nurses’ lives and indirectly helps patients thrive.

The article, “Adaptation to Motherhood for Rural Women With Newborn(s) in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit” most clearly discerns the capacity for trust to enhance life changes. Here, mothers who live far from their newborns for a time, positively adapt to their new roles as they trust in those caring for their babies. This essential adaptation is life-enhancing for mother, baby, families, and society at large.

The ongoing pandemic demonstrates with every successive wave how trust, and conversely breach of trust, entwine large governments and personal relationships, influencing life and death through COVID-19. Trust is a thread woven into humanity’s pursuit for better tomorrows. We hope you enjoy this issue.

Meredith King-Jensen, PhD, MSN, RN Alsacia L. Sepulveda-Pacsi, PhD, DNS, RN, FNP, CCRN, CEN Coreen Simmons, PhD-c, DNP, MSN, MPH, RN Audrey Graham-O’Gilvie, DNP, ACNS-BC Anne Bové, MSN, RN-BC, CCRN, ANP