The Words We Use Matter
Many years ago, when I was becoming the Director of a "Training" Department I made my case to change the department name to Education and Professional Development. It was much harder than I had suspected and at the end the best the organization was willing to do was "Education and Training."
In nursing, the words we use shape more than sentences, they shape perception, power, and purpose.
Few words reveal this more than the uneasy interchange between education and training. When we describe nurses as trained, we imply a technical identity, someone taught to complete a set of tasks with accuracy and consistency. Training produces efficiency. It creates compliance. It centers on doing.
But nursing has never been about compliance, even though the Florence enthusiasts may disagree. At its core it has always been about comprehension of the human existence.
Education prepares nurses to think, to discern, to interpret. It cultivates judgment, empathy, and ethical reasoning. It builds the intellectual and moral framework that allows a nurse not only to perform a procedure, but to understand why it matters, when it matters, and to whom it matters most.
When nursing is described through the lens of training, the profession becomes procedural in nature, a pathway focused on skill rather than intellect. That framing pulls nursing closer to a trade than a science, diluting its theoretical, ethical, and analytical depth. It also shapes how institutions build curricula, structure roles, and determine value. The language of the procedural nurse confines the profession to a posture of performance, where success is measured in repetition rather than reflection.
Nursing does require procedural skill, but those skills must rest upon education. Tasks can be mastered through repetition. Judgment must be educated.
And that difference has never mattered more than it does now.
In the age of artificial intelligence, words like training and procedure carry new weight. If nursing defines itself through the procedural, we risk writing ourselves out of relevance. Machines are built to execute. They do not question, tire, or forget. If nursing is seen as a collection of standardized tasks, AI will do them faster, and without complaint.
But AI cannot understand meaning. It cannot interpret silence. It cannot feel the moral tension between doing everything and doing the right thing.
Nursing’s value has never been in what we do, it has always been in how we understand. AI can calculate probabilities; it cannot comprehend suffering. It can process data; it cannot hold presence.
If we allow nursing to be defined by the procedural, we make it easy for systems to imagine replacing us. But when we insist that nursing is grounded in education, in judgment, ethics, cultural fluency, and humanity, AI becomes a tool that extends our reach, not an entity that defines our limits.
Education creates nurses who question, interpret, and re-center the human story in a data-driven world. It ensures that technology serves humanity, not the other way around.
The threat is not that AI will take over nursing. The threat is that we will surrender nursing’s intellect to the language of the procedural before it has the chance.
Nurses are not procedural laborers fulfilling a role, they are educated clinicians advancing a discipline. They do not simply provide care; they shape the very meaning of healing.
