StoryCollab helped a regional healthcare and nursing-education partnership turn first-person experiences into workshops, curriculum, screenings, a research library, and the documentary NURSE: Empathy Heals.
The Nurse Narratives Initiative is a regional collaboration among Ballad Health, the Tennessee Center for Nursing Advancement, ETSU College of Nursing, StoryCollab, and the ETSU Research Corporation. It uses first-person digital storytelling to cultivate empathy, renew purpose, and reinforce resilience across nursing education and practice. Nurses, students, faculty, and patients share lived experiences through workshops, reflection sessions, curriculum activities, screenings, and multimedia resources.
Nursing requires clinical expertise, but the emotional realities of care can be difficult to name, process, or discuss. New nurses may experience reality shock as classroom learning meets the demands of practice, contributing to burnout, compassion fatigue, and turnover. Across roles, caregivers and patients also need safe ways to reflect, listen, and reconnect with the human experiences at the center of care. The partners needed more than a single storytelling event: they wanted an integrated approach that could support individual well-being, nursing education, organizational learning, and community engagement.
StoryCollab helped the partners build an interconnected storytelling initiative rather than a stand-alone media project:
Together, these components give stories multiple lives: as reflective experiences for storytellers, teaching tools for nursing programs, catalysts for conversation at screenings, evidence-informed resources for leaders, and public media that honors the profession's human dimensions.
What the Collaboration Created
Whether you’re starting with a spark of an idea or a fully formed vision, we’re here to help you shape it into something meaningful, lasting, and heard. Reach out and let’s explore what we can create together.
