Overview: Nursing Our Healer’s Heart is a gentle exploration of nurse-specific traumatization, which affects 96% of nurses, along with an actionable recovery plan for nurses to heal together as they begin to thrive instead of just survive in their practices.

Verdict: As I think we all know now, and have done for quite a few years/decades, nurses in hospitals are frequently under pressure due to a combination of factors including heavy workloads, staffing shortages, complex patient needs, time constraints, and the demanding nature of their job, often leading to burnout and stress, particularly during situations like a pandemic where patient volume may surge significantly.

So yeah, the nursing profession is, in general, in crisis. Within a decade, the world will have just over half the number of nurses it needs. The global nursing workforce has experienced mass, complex trauma secondary to healthcare system inadequacies and a global pandemic. Traumatized and burned out nurses are leaving their roles or the profession in unprecedented numbers. Those who remain are stretched to or beyond their capacity.

As noted, the fact that the healthcare organizations are still grappling with a nursing shortage crisis is nothing new. While some health systems have had success in rebuilding their nursing workforces in recent months, estimates still suggest a potential shortage of 200,000 to 450,000 nurses in the United States, with acute-care settings likely to be most affected, according to a recent article.

And as of March 2023, 45 percent of inpatient nurses reported they are likely to leave their role in the next six months, citing feeling undervalued by their organization and not having a manageable workload as their top two reasons. Healthcare leaders cannot build an effective staffing strategy without understanding how nurses are spending their time, how they would like to spend their time, and how their needs are evolving.

While system-level strategies aim to address this crisis, none of them consider nurse traumatization and its impact upon patient safety, outcomes, and quality of care. We cannot wait for health systems to prioritize nurse safety. Nurses can and must come together as a global community to heal through avoidable and unavoidable nurse-specific traumatization while partnering with healthcare leaders to usher in a new era of nursing.

However, this book, and through an actionable framework, guides nurses in healing the traumas and hardships they’ve endured as individuals and nursing communities. Grounded in the sciences of unitary caring, integrative nursing, neurophysiology, and transpersonal neurobiology, this book supports nurses in restoring their healers’ heart as they come together to address the deep trauma, burnout, attrition, and presenteeism that are central to the nursing crisis.

Thus Dr. Lorre Laws’ book (which is broken down into three sections - Healing Is Possible, Healing Is Happening, and Thriving in Practice & in Life - each with varying chapters within them) diligently explores these entangled, seemingly ever more complex as the years go by layers of trauma, most all too often ignored or overlooked, and strives to bring forth here a dutifully written, expertly cultured, and definitely vitally informative prose of a resource for anyone treating, or even themselves recovering from chronic illness, or a severe sense of burnout or traumatization.

For it is here within these pages that Nurses will learn the language of their nervous system and how to navigate it as a foundational practice to support professional wellbeing. Each nurse will discover their unique innate care plan, which will guide their healing and co-healing with other nurses.

As the author herself admits, This book was written for you, and it is about you, my most respected colleague, nurse and healer. I, too, am a nurse. I wrote this book for nurses who have experienced or are experiencing trauma or burnout, or who do not feel safe, seen, or heard, supported in practice.

And so by embracing the healing and practices offered in this book, nurses will learn how to support their nervous system regulation so they can thrive instead of survive in practice. Working from their healed scars instead of their open wounds, nurses can effectively lead sustainable organizational change and health care reforms that prioritize nurse safety and professional wellbeing.

About the Author - Dr. Lorre Laws is an author, healer, teacher, and integrative nursing professor who helps nurses who are experiencing burnout or traumatization -- often secondary to system inadequacies. Dr. Lorre guides nurses as they heal and recover together; moving from surviving to thriving in practice.

She founded The Haelan Academy, a nonprofit organization to support nurses throughout their career. As an engaging, informative, and entertaining speaker, Dr. Lorre is a beacon of way showing light for nurses and health professions as they usher in Nursing 2.0, a new paradigm that prioritizes nurse safety and professional wellbeing. She lives in Tucson, AZ.

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