“The process of storytelling is a process of finding meaning, and in that process, one can’t help but be changed. It helped me to understand and accept how my childhood experiences have shaped me into the person I am today; but more than that, it helped me understand how universal some stories are. That understanding makes me a better nurse, a better mother, and ultimately, a better human being.”
Since 2019, Nurstory has partnered with Nurse-Family Partnership, an organization that employs home health nurses to empower first-time parents with significant risk factors to transform their lives and create better futures for themselves and their babies.
NFP nurses and nurse supervisors have come together, to remember and crystallize stories of how and why they do the work they do and what care really means in the contexts in which they work. The program is aimed at increasing resilience for the participants and helping them process both first-hand and vicarious trauma they are exposed to in their practice in the hopes that it leads to better health and higher nurse retention.
Nurstory/NFP weekly storytelling webinar.
Since COVID-19 and the layered stressors stemming from systemic oppression and racism that affects so many NFP nurses and their patients, Nurstory began offering a series of weekly reflective storytelling webinars. NFP nurses and nurse supervisors from around the country come weekly to share their experiences with patients, with each other, and are making a series of snapshot (one-picture) stories to be used in social media campaigns, and here on the Nurstory website.
Nurstory - the Documentary captures the impact that the innovative digital storytelling program for nurses can have on participants in the process. This short-form documentary follows nurses from the Nurse-Family Partnership, an organization that empowers first-time moms to transform their lives and create better futures for themselves and their babies, as they participated in one of Nurstory's digital storytelling workshops. They talked about life-changing, practice-changing moments from their experiences with clients, other health care professionals, as well as experiences from their life outside of work to see how their definitions of care have changed over time. They examined how their life informs their work and how their work informs their life. And film crews captured exactly how the skilled Nurstory facilitators led the nurses through this process.
The Stories
