The Biggest Mistake I Made Was Trying to Be the Perfect Nurse

When I first became a nurse, I wasn't trying to become a good one.

I was trying to become a perfect one.

Looking back now, after nearly two decades in healthcare, I can see that this was probably the biggest mistake I made in my career.

Not because striving for excellence is wrong.

But because I confused perfection with competence.

I believed that good nurses didn't make mistakes.

And every mistake I made became evidence that I wasn't good enough.

I don't think I was a perfectionist before nursing.

Like most people, I wanted to do well, but I never obsessed over getting everything exactly right.

Nursing changed that.

Healthcare is one of the few professions where mistakes can have real consequences for another person's life. That reality sits quietly in the background of every shift. Every medication, every assessment, every handover and every decision carries responsibility.

As a graduate, that responsibility felt enormous.

I wasn't just worried about getting something wrong.

I was terrified of it.

I convinced myself that mistakes meant I wasn't competent enough to be a nurse.

That belief shaped almost everything I did during those early years.

The funny thing is, I genuinely believed everyone around me was getting it right.

The senior nurses always seemed calm.

They recognised deteriorating patients before anyone else.

They knew medications I'd never heard of.

They answered doctors' questions without hesitation.

They seemed to know exactly what to do, even in situations I'd never seen before.

I rarely saw them make mistakes.

Or perhaps more accurately...

I never noticed them.

Instead, every mistake I made stood out like a spotlight.

If I forgot something, I remembered it for days.

If I needed help, I questioned whether I deserved to be there.

If I was slower than everyone else, I assumed I simply wasn't cut out for nursing.

What I didn't realise at the time was that I wasn't comparing myself to other graduate nurses.

I was comparing myself to people with five, ten or twenty years of experience.

I expected my clinical judgement to match theirs.

My speed to match theirs.

My confidence to match theirs.

It was an impossible standard.

One mistake still stands out from those early years.

It was a minor medication error.

Thankfully, it had very little consequence for the patient.

If you asked anyone else involved, they probably wouldn't even remember it happened.

But I do.

At the time, it felt enormous.

Not because of the clinical outcome.

Because of what I believed it said about me.

I didn't think,

"I made a mistake."

I thought,

"Maybe I'm not safe enough to be a nurse."

Looking back now, that's a heartbreaking thing for a young nurse to believe.

After difficult shifts, I didn't reflect.

At least not in a healthy way.

I'd replay every decision on the drive home.

Every conversation.

Every hesitation.

Every tiny mistake.

I'd spend the next few days wondering what I should have done differently.

Then I'd arrive for my next shift carrying all of that self-doubt with me.

My reflection wasn't really reflection at all.

It was self-criticism disguised as learning.

I almost never stopped to think about the things I'd done well.

The patient I'd comforted.

The assessment I'd recognised.

The procedure I'd finally become confident performing.

Instead, my brain filtered everything through one question.

"What did I get wrong?"

The strange part is that none of this made me a better nurse.

It simply made me a less confident one.

As the years passed, something started to change.

Not overnight.

Slowly.

Almost without me noticing.

I started seeing mistakes.

Not my mistakes.

Everyone's.

One day I was double-checking a medication calculation with a very experienced nurse.

Someone I respected enormously.

I noticed an error in the calculation.

Nothing dramatic.

Just a simple mistake.

We corrected it together.

And then something unexpected happened.

They didn't spiral.

They didn't question whether they should still be a nurse.

They didn't spend the rest of the shift apologising.

They simply corrected it...

...and moved on.

At first, that surprised me.

Then it taught me one of the most important lessons of my career.

Experience doesn't eliminate mistakes.

It changes your relationship with them.

The longer I worked, the more I realised something else.

Every single person in the hospital makes mistakes.

Every day.

Doctors.

Nurses.

Pharmacists.

Paramedics.

Students.

Managers.

The difference isn't whether mistakes happen.

It's what happens next.

Do we recognise them?

Do we own them?

Do we learn from them?

Do we change our practice?

Or do we let them quietly shape the way we think about ourselves?

Interestingly, the mistakes don't disappear as you become more experienced.

They evolve.

As a graduate, you're worried about forgetting observations.

Making a medication error.

Missing part of an assessment.

Years later, the mistakes become different.

Did I make the right triage decision?

Did I move that patient too early?

Should I have escalated sooner?

Was there another diagnosis I should have considered?

Experience doesn't remove uncertainty.

It simply changes the questions you're asking.

Looking back now, I realise something else that would have helped me enormously as a graduate.

We don't talk enough about mistakes.

We spend a lot of time teaching new nurses not to make them.

We emphasise patient safety.

Policies.

Procedures.

Double checks.

And rightly so.

Patient safety should always come first.

But somewhere along the way, many graduates quietly absorb another message.

"Good nurses don't make mistakes."

That simply isn't true.

Good nurses recognise mistakes.

Good nurses speak up.

Good nurses ask for help.

Good nurses reflect honestly.

Good nurses change their practice because of what they've learned.

Those are very different things.

I sometimes wonder how many young nurses leave shifts believing they're failing simply because nobody has told them that every experienced nurse has their own collection of mistakes they've learned from.

Not because they were careless.

Because they're human.

Some of the nurses I respect most today aren't the ones who've never made an error.

They're the ones who own them.

The ones who openly say,

"I missed that."

"I should have asked for help."

"Let's talk about what happened."

There's something incredibly reassuring about working with people like that.

It creates psychological safety.

It makes learning normal.

It reminds everyone around them that competence isn't about never getting things wrong.

It's about responding well when you do.

My wife is also a nurse.

One of the advantages of that is we often unpack our shifts together.

Sometimes we'll talk about difficult decisions.

Sometimes we'll question whether there was a better way to approach something.

Those conversations aren't about beating ourselves up.

They're about understanding.

Reflection has become something very different to what it was twenty years ago.

Back then it was about proving I wasn't good enough.

Now it's about asking,

"What can I learn from today?"

Those are very different questions.

One destroys confidence.

The other builds it.

If a graduate nurse came to me today and told me they couldn't stop thinking about an error, I wouldn't start by talking about the mistake.

I'd start by talking about them.

I'd remind them that everyone makes mistakes.

I'd tell them that this moment doesn't define their career.

I'd point out everything they did well that shift, because chances are they've already forgotten those parts.

Then we'd unpack what happened together.

Not to assign blame.

But to understand it.

Because mistakes are rarely the result of one bad nurse making one bad decision.

More often they're a combination of factors.

Fatigue.

Interruptions.

Communication.

Inexperience.

Systems.

Missed opportunities to ask for help.

Understanding those factors is where the learning happens.

Not in endlessly replaying the moment.

If I could go back and speak to the graduate version of myself, I wouldn't tell him to stop caring.

I'd tell him to stop expecting perfection.

I'd tell him that the nurses he admired weren't perfect either.

They'd simply learned not to let every mistake become part of their identity.

I'd tell him that confidence isn't built by never getting things wrong.

It's built by surviving those moments, learning from them and coming back to work willing to keep improving.

Because that's what nursing really is.

Not perfection.

Progress.

Not never making mistakes.

Learning from them.

Not being fearless.

Being reflective.

After eighteen years, I still make mistakes.

I'll probably make more before my career is over.

The difference now is they no longer define me.

They teach me.

And if there's one thing I hope every graduate nurse understands, it's this:

Perfection isn't possible in healthcare.

But reflection is.

And reflection will always make you a better nurse than perfection ever could.