Healthcare is an industry where careers and patient care are both fueled by relationships. As you navigate the arc of your professional life, your multidisciplinary colleagues can be a special fuel for your future. At the same time, your connections with patients can bring meaning and purpose to your work. All in all, relationships could not be more critical to your career and your personal and professional fulfillment.
A Fuel Source for Your Future
While you may frequently be successful in finding new opportunities by responding to job postings and submitting applications, resumes, and cover letters, positions can also sometimes be found through connections and relationships.
There’s conflicting evidence online regarding how many jobs are actually landed through networking. Still, we can say without a doubt that paying attention to relationships with valuable colleagues will never hurt you and can very likely be a benefit at some point in your career.
Let’s face it: someday, you may need a professional reference, an introduction to a key individual at a facility you’re interested in, some priceless career advice, a mentor, or maybe someone to serve as your preceptor during your nurse practitioner program.
There are many ways in which relationships can benefit you and your nursing career. A connection with a current or previous colleague could hold a key that unlocks something vital for you and your professional development.
You have everything to gain from maintaining collegial relationships, and it doesn’t need to take that much energy. Some of your connections with certain colleagues will easily lend themselves to friendship, being in touch via text or email, or perhaps just a Christmas card once a year. With others, it may look like being aware of one another’s career development on LinkedIn and checking in occasionally.
However, how you go about it, a small investment of time, energy, and positive attention can reap many benefits in the scheme of things.
Lessening the Toll
Beyond networking and keeping an eye on the future, your present experience also holds great importance. You want to feel good at work, and supporting and being supported by others makes hard work feel less taxing.
In your day-to-day work, your relationships with physicians, other nurses, social workers, chaplains, administrators, managers, preceptors, instructors — they all have a potential role to play. Positive interactions and camaraderie can make your days less stressful and more manageable. When you and your colleagues can rely on one another when the going gets tough, the difficult days can take less of a toll.
Professional relationships matter, and the rewards far outweigh the time and energy spent cultivating and nurturing them.
Meaning, Fulfillment, and Purpose
As mentioned above, your connections with colleagues can be critical to how you feel about your work and your day-to-day experience. Add to this the relational aspects of the nurse-patient relationship, and there’s a recipe for increased meaning, fulfillment, and sense of purpose that can add to your feelings of job and career satisfaction.
Relating to patients, communicating with empathy, expressing compassion, and being the kind of nurse who shows caring and kindness all point to the highly relational aspect of nursing. While nurses may provide much patient education, the art of conversation with patients and their families goes far beyond teaching about medications, side effects, diagnoses, and follow-up care.
A great deal of warmth can be generated in the context of the nurse-patient relationship, and we can’t overlook how the meaning behind nursing others back to health or comforting them during illness or the dying process is a significant motivator for many of us becoming nurses in the first place.
Keep Relationships Top of Mind
Whether cultivating connections with patients and their families or nurturing positive communication with your multidisciplinary colleagues, the importance of relationships in every aspect of your career is multifaceted and beyond measure.
Keep relationships top of mind, be aware of the quality of your interactions, and enjoy how connecting with other humans can be one of the most important fuels of a satisfying career.
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