Nursing Faculty Inspires College students to Embrace Self-care and Promote Wholesome Lifestyles

BALTIMORE, Md. – For Dr. Lyndsay Wright ’19, M’22, she doesn’t simply need her college students to carry out effectively on their subsequent examination. She additionally cares about how effectively they sleep. “How many nursing students get 8 hours of sleep? Not many,” she mentioned. “As their clinical instructor, I want them to prioritize their sleep. Whether it is sleep, diet, or exercise, I want to inspire them to take care of themselves.”

The assistant professor in Notre Dame of Maryland University’s School of Nursing tries to mannequin prioritize your well being and encourages her college students to do the identical for his or her sufferers. “As a professional nurse, you have a duty to yourself – the same duty that you owe to others, you owe to yourself,” she mentioned.

Dr. Wright takes her ardour for wholesome dwelling into the classroom. In 2025, she earned a Doctor of Nursing Practice, with a focus in life-style medication, from Southern Adventist University. Her doctoral analysis, centered on infuse life-style medication into the nursing curriculum, not solely helps college students undertake self-care practices, but it surely helps them see each affected person as a “whole person when they provide care,” she mentioned.

Learn extra about how Dr. Wright infuses life-style medication into her educating and the way it advantages her college students:

What is life-style medication, and the way do you incorporate it into your nursing programs?

Lifestyle medication is a medical specialty that prioritizes therapeutic life-style interventions to forestall, deal with, and typically even reverse lifestyle-related persistent illness, which is almost all of the burden illness we’re seeing proper now. It addresses conduct and general environmental modifications to advertise the company of the affected person, serving to them make modifications to protect and enhance their well being.

I attempt to combine it in each classroom dialog. Every time we discuss a case examine, and we’re taking a look at a affected person state of affairs, I ask, ‘How could we attend to this person’s spiritual health, their diet, or their physical activity level? How can we support them?’ I can inform from my college students’ assignments that these classes are making a distinction when they’re making their care plans. Or once I overhear the scholars throughout scientific speaking to a affected person, asking, ‘What brings you joy?’ or ‘What would inspire you to become more physically active or eat more fruits and vegetables?’

I can see lots of the college students making use of it to their very own lives as effectively. One of our values within the School of Nursing is self-care. How higher to reside out self-care than by means of modalities like life-style medication, which take a look at the entire individual?

Where does your ardour for life-style medication and nursing schooling come from?

My ardour began once I was younger. I noticed my mother work actually, actually laborious as a single father or mother, being there for me, juggling the calls for of proudly owning a house, getting me to soccer follow, however not prioritizing her personal well being. That led her to turn into chronically in poor health and have fairly a number of lifestyle-related medical circumstances. While I used to be in nursing faculty at Notre Dame, my mother was identified with a number of persistent well being circumstances, together with kidney illness, hypertension, and elevated ldl cholesterol. I instantly went on a hunt to determine what we might do collectively to enhance her well being and stop future problems. We principally emptied out all our cupboards, and I virtually compelled her to give up smoking. We prioritized our well being, getting bodily energetic, and consuming extra fruit and veggies. That was the place the pursuit of life-style medication began. The miracle is that my mother now not has kidney illness, with regular blood strain and levels of cholesterol, after strict adherence to her medical routine and intensive life-style modifications. Nearly 10 years later, she is now not chronically in poor health from a scientific perspective and continues to reside a more healthy life-style.

After I graduated from Notre Dame, I spotted that as a bedside nurse, I might solely have an effect on possibly 5 to seven sufferers in a single shift on the hospital. That wasn’t sufficient for me. I figured that possibly nursing schooling could be a technique to attain extra individuals. I might assist college students to study this manner of nursing – to plant these seeds of conduct change for his or her sufferers. And in flip, not solely would I have an effect on college students by permitting them to commit to raised caring for themselves and their relations, however then that may hopefully trickle right down to their sufferers. That was my impetus for going into nursing schooling.

You have determined to proceed working as knowledgeable nurse even whereas educating at NDMU. Why is it vital so that you can proceed your scientific follow?

I simply love my affected person inhabitants [at MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center]. In my unit, I work primarily with stroke sufferers. It’s my dwelling. I’m going on my eighth yr there. I simply love the group. Everyone in that hospital is my household. I really feel like I’m nonetheless capable of have interaction with my neighborhood as a result of it’s a neighborhood hospital the place we regularly see the identical sufferers. I additionally nonetheless like to be on the bedside. Bringing college students there actually makes me completely happy as effectively.

How did your expertise as an NDMU scholar affect the educator you might be in the present day?

I can relate to the scholar expertise right here. There is such a various inhabitants at Notre Dame, and lots of of our college students come from non-traditional backgrounds. That was the case for me as a first-generation school scholar. I didn’t know what to anticipate from going to school. I picked Notre Dame as a result of it felt like dwelling.

I see a number of myself in a lot of my college students who’ve picked Notre Dame for related causes. Knowing simply how dedicated Notre Dame is to private transformation, I try to work towards being one of the best educator to assist my college students remodel. College ought to change you in one of the simplest ways – that is what it did for me. I would like my college students to have that very same transformative expertise, to allow them to exit into the world and be one of the best model of themselves.
 

Established in 1895, Notre Dame of Maryland University (NDMU) is a non-public, Catholic establishment in Baltimore, Maryland, with the mission to teach leaders to rework the world. Notre Dame has been named top-of-the-line “Regional Universities North” by U.S. News & World Report.