I attended the NLN Education Summit last month and appreciated its emphasis on competency-based education to improve practice readiness of graduate nurses and close the gap between how nursing is taught and practiced. It is exciting to see this renewed and needed emphasis in nursing education!

But for me, the highlight of this conference was the opportunity to meet and talk with Brother Ignatius Perkins, OP, PhD, RN, FAAN, ANEF, FNYAM, FNCBC. Brother Perkins is a Dominican Friar and Professor of Nursing at Providence College in Rhode Island. He also coordinates the Safeguarding Program for the Dominican Friars, Eastern Province.

He is widely known for his advocacy in assisting clinicians and supporting vulnerable members of society – the poor, homeless, elderly, victims and survivors of abuse, and the terminally ill. Learn more about his incredible story and legacy to nursing and nursing education. 

In our time together, he shared something that stuck with me. 

“We are educating healers who practice nursing.”

In his reflections upon receiving the Lifetime Achievement for Transformative Excellence Award, here are some insights he shared that build on this thought. I hope they cause you to reflect on the bigger picture and the eternal significance of your work as a nurse educator who is also a nurse “formater,” forming this timeless professional identity of the nursing profession in your students. 

We celebrate the richness of our vocation, indeed the work of the heart, in caring with compassion—especially to the unwanted, the unloved, those who have no place to lay their heads at night, those near the end of their lives, the differently abled, those who have been harmed by others, and to our colleagues. 

Let us also honor those who have gone before us and humbled us through their courage as they brought healing, hope, and peace to the world through the gifts of the art and science of nursing. 

We honor and celebrate all nurses who continue to transform human life, so that the ineradicable values, the Trilogy of Nursing: human dignity, freedom and human flourishing, can lead one another, our colleagues, our families, our communities, and our world to an enduring peace. 

As you continue to bring healing and hope to the world, we ask for God’s blessing on each of you and our colleagues with the Blessing of your Healing Hands:

• These are your Hands of compassion and courage; 
• These are your Hands of knowledge and skill;
• These are your Hands of human touch, comfort and love;
• These are your Hands of the Spirit of human life;
• These are your Hands that support and assure hope;
• These are your Hands that protect human dignity, integrity, and diversity; 
• These are your Hands that defend freedom, justice, and inclusion;  
• These are your Hands that promote human flourishing;
• These are your Hands that bring an enduring peace to our world;
• These are your Hands that accompany those at the beginning and near the end of life;
• These are your Hands that care for our colleagues who are often alone suffering;
• These are your Hands that care for the wounded healers in our midst;
• These are your Hands that heal and lift the human spirit;
• These are your Hands that dare to pause to listen and to hear the suffering of others;
• These are your Hands that wipe the tears of colleagues when their hands are empty.

Come, good and loving God, Father of us all, show us your beauty, reflected in every person in our world, so that we may discover anew that every person is unique and important and every person is necessary. We are but different faces of the one humanity that You so love. Amen.

This sentiment for nursing was also embodied in Isabel Hampton Robb, one of the founders of the NLN over 120 years ago, who wrote in her textbook Nursing Ethics (1900):

The spirit in which she does her work makes all the difference. Invested as she should in the dignity of her profession and the cloak of love for suffering humanity, she can ennoble anything her hand may be called upon to do, and for work done in this spirit, there will ever come a recompense far outweighing that of silver and gold.