A nurse is always a nurse

Author: Real Rodeles del Pozo

Origin/Affiliation: Pioneer of geriatric and palliative nursing in Spain

It is difficult for me to describe my professional life, which has been a beautiful journey with small accidents resolved.

I started after finishing seventh and revalidating, that was the name of one of the forms of access to the university at that time.

I left my hometown, Tudela, at the age of 19 to enter the San José and Santa Adela Red Cross school in Madrid in 1969.

After a year of anecdotes and adaptation, in 1970 the new Geriatrics unit directed by Professor Salgado and Guillén was launched, something new where I studied with my youth, and my desire, helping to take care of the elderly and their needs.

You must understand that at that time there was no population aging like now and this unit was not one of the priority focuses of medical development as it can be now.

What did we begin to implement, methodologies that are now surely basic or essential, avoiding so many medical visits "from Herod to Pilate", using tenderness as the best generic and working as a team to move towards a common goal, the well-being of people.

After this pleasant learning experience and continuing my permanent and constant training to never be outdated, especially with skills such as patient communication and improvements in care and cures, I continued my professional performance in different areas of Spanish public health occupying, both positions of responsibility in specialty centers and in ambulatory primary care.

At the end of the 90s I took a Master's Degree in Gerontology-Geriatrics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, which allowed me to broaden the essence of my primary education and my apprenticeship. professional, I discovered the patient to be treated as a bio-psycho-social and spiritual being, a 360° approach when it came to the affective care relationship and since then I continued my professional career with that important baggage that came in handy when it came to to face one of my last active professional challenges, leaving family medicine care and leading the deployment e in Zaragoza of home palliative care in 1999. Implementing this category of care, still little known and sometimes "feared" at the time, was key to improving the experience of patients in this terminal phase of their illnesses, because we made available person at the center of the praxis, respecting their integrity, being the most important part of the process of cures and care and, above all, listening to the patient and his family at the end of his life.

For me, I can proudly say that one of the delights that my role as a nurse is that I will always will have this caregiver personality even on periods when everything looks darker.

To summarize I could say that with a little love and the desire to be permanently in training to update myself on trends, clinical news and forms of relationship and communication, you can see the work that I have done for more than 40 years since humility but with excellence and always focused on the patient.