Cool People, Good Work: Nurses

This month’s Cool People, Good Work is dedicated to Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Intensive Care Unit nurse at the Minneapolis VA. His life was taken far too soon.

I’ve been pretty fortunate in my own health. I haven’t needed long hospital stays or many emergency room visits, and most of my interactions with the healthcare system have been planned. I know that’s a privilege.

But through the recent experiences of people close to me, I’ve had a front-row seat to the stressful situations and difficult circumstances that nurses deal with every day. They serve everyone: the wealthy and the struggling, people who speak different languages or none at all. Nearly every person they encounter is having a hard day, and almost all of them would rather be somewhere else. In our current state of health care, they are often taking care of people who have waited for several hours and are sometimes being treated in the hallway due to lack of available rooms. 

That’s why nurses get my nod for January.

The nurses I’ve met and interacted with seem to genuinely care about the people in their charge. They combine service with patience, helping patients understand not only what’s happening, but what comes next and how they are trying to get them back up and going. They work under high-degrees of pressure, regularly deliver or witness difficult news, and still manage to walk into the next room with a calm and steady presence, no matter what they just handled minutes before.

Everyone faces unpleasantness at work. My own complaints are few—a declining market, a lost prospect, a tough call with a client. But nurses deal with continual frustration, whether it is patient-based or (probably far more often) administrative. The fact that many do not let that affect the care they provide to a stranger is amazing to me.

To honor Alex, and the millions of nurses who help keep us standing, IndiWealth is donating to the North Hennepin Community College (NHCC) Creating Opportunities Fund. We chose NHCC because they are local to us here in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota and are helping train the next generation of caregivers.

A few reasons we believe in their work:

• Over 50% of students are the first in their families to attend college
• 58% are minority students, and 32% qualify for Pell Grants (income based need)
• The nursing program has an 88.7% first-time licensure pass rate
• 82% of nursing graduates are employed as RNs within 12 months

If you’d like to support their mission, you can donate here: NHCC Foundation – Ways to Give