What is a professional title, and why is it important? These are critical questions that have been central to our evolving identity as veterinary nurses. Our evolution as veterinary professionals spans decades, but from the early 1960s we began an important shift in our identity when we started claiming the title of nurse. This shift was shaped by a fundamental recognition of our similarity in role to human nursing. This recognition cannot be understated as a pivotal turning point, and a continued driver for professional evolution of the veterinary nursing profession. It both beneficial for veterinary nurses and a challenge, simultaneously offering a world of opportunities following human nursing but also challenging us to carve out our own path. I believe it is this duality that is presently holding us back.
Are we nurses, or are we a profession using the title yet not embracing everything that it means to be a nurse? One key point that distinguishes us from human nursing is history and education. We are still in our youth with barely 50 years' experience using the formal title of nurse to describe us. If we compare our timeline to human nursing, we can see that at this age human nurses were starting to contribute to their scientific body of knowledge about the profession itself. This, more than anything helped to evolve identity in human nursing, and it is precisely what we are missing. We simply lack the vast numbers of post graduate veterinary nurses who are publishing about our profession. I believe this is because we haven't yet realised that post graduate qualifications aren't just for industry to create nurse practitioners, they are also essential for advancing our profession, and our identity.
We need more people researching our practices, our processes, our identity, and the value of our role in the animal healthcare setting. In human nursing, the literature shows that graduate and post graduate trained nurses positively impact patient outcomes. We need more of this type of research in veterinary nursing and to get there we need more graduate and postgraduate educated veterinary nurses. We need them in our hospitals, doing this research, measuring patient outcomes, and advocating for the value of patient safety as central to our clinical governance processes. We need more veterinary nurses researching nursing processes because it is this skillset of nursing that sets us apart from other members of the veterinary team. We need clinical reasoning and thinking skills embedded in our educational frameworks to create problem solvers, and an educational system that is responsive to both our industry, and our profession. Our future, our evolution, our identity, and our title depend on it. We also need to develop our skillset in leadership, and systems thinking so that we can lead ourselves. We need to normalise discussions about intra-collaborative self-leading teams that empower growth mindsets, and respect.
We have claimed our title, and now it is a matter of owning it, fully exploring what our nursing skillset means to our profession, and what it means to the animals and people we serve. The first step is understanding truly what thinking like a nurse means, because this is at the heart of what sets us apart. The second step is advancing our education and scholarship to increase research, to investigate how we can use thinking skills, identity, and title to evolve our profession. We comprise more than half of the veterinary sector, the future of our sector depends on our evolution, identity, and title as veterinary nurses.