What’s So Important About NANMT?

by Andy Bernay-Roman, MS, RN, LMT

NANMT is important because touch is important. NANMT stands as a vanguard for touch in healthcare, introducing the health benefits of intelligent, healing touch to the nursing and medical worlds, as no other organization can.

NANMT stands as a reminder to nurses, doctors, and all healthcare practitioners, that our collective trades are rooted in touch. Florence Nightingale, in her statement, “Nature alone cures. Our task is to expose our patients to its forces,” is espousing a holism at the core of NANMT’s philosophy and the practice of nurse massage therapy.

NANMT affirms to nurses that there is an alternative to burnout: touch your patients more! Integrate touch modalities to bring the satisfaction factor back into your nursing practice. Go beyond pills and paperwork! Empower yourself as a nurse! Directly help set the stage for nature to do its work! NANMT helps a nurse focus on caring in her nursing care.

Thanks to the stellar greats such as Bonnie Mackey and Bobbi Harris, NANMT has en-tered the official world of nursing specialty practice. They produced the Standards of Practice for the Nurse Massage Therapist, as well as a scholarly manual on the proper methods of documenting nurse massage therapy interventions, which ensured NANMT’s place among the ranks of nursing specialty groups as a member of the Nurs-ing Organization Alliance (NOA). Because of NANMT, nurse massage therapists stand with a full recognition of nursing specialty status. Without NANMT, nurses who touch and who want to use their trained touch skills, are out on a limb, and on the fringe. NANMT legitimizes us as no other organization can.

In the past NANMT has assisted nurse massage therapists in the legal arena, docu-menting that in fact, massage is within the scope of nursing practice. NANMT has worked and will continue to work towards procuring rulings in every state, from every state Board of Nursing, that massage is within the scope of nursing practice for a duly trained nurse. That in turn, will lead to more third party reimbursement for nurse mas-sage therapy treatments.

NANMT is all about touch. And that’s important to us all. Please join and lend your en-ergy and support.