Acupressure at the Bedside: 5 Practical Techniques Every Nurse Can Use This Week
There's a particular kind of moment every nurse knows: a patient is anxious, or nauseated, or in pain, and the next available intervention is minutes or hours away. You want something you can offer right now, with nothing but your hands and a little training. That's the gap acupressure is built to fill — and it's why we're spending this week talking about it, from a hands-on workshop happening Saturday to a full certification a week after that.
Five Points: One Hour
This Saturday, September 12, NFNH is hosting Clinical Acupressure: 5 Points You Can Use at the Bedside, a 60-minute live workshop covering five specific pressure points nurses can bring into practice immediately — one each for pain, anxiety, nausea, sleep, and stress. None of it requires special equipment or a standing order. It's simply a matter of knowing where to press, how much pressure to use, and when the technique is appropriate.
This isn't a replacement for clinical judgment or medical treatment — it's an additional tool, the kind of thing you reach for in the two minutes before a medication can be administered, or alongside one to support a patient who wants to feel more in control of their own care. Nurses who've taken workshops like this one often say the same thing afterward: it's not the depth of the technique that surprises them, it's how often the opportunity to use it comes up in an ordinary shift.
The workshop is $25, runs 9:30–10:30 AM ET this Saturday, and you can register here.
Going deeper: the Acupressure Certificate for Nurses
If Saturday's workshop leaves you wanting more than five points, the next step is already on the calendar. The Acupressure Certificate for Nurses is a separate, more comprehensive program — six AHNA-approved contact hours delivered across paired Saturday sessions, with the first pair on September 19 and October 3. Where the single workshop gives you five techniques to start with, the certificate builds toward a real, credentialed foundation in acupressure as a clinical skill — something you can describe on a resume, not just something you picked up once.
It's worth naming clearly, because the two programs share a topic and it's an easy mix-up: this certificate is a distinct offering from Saturday's $25 workshop, with its own dates, its own hours, and its own.
One Technique Among Many
Acupressure is one thread in a much larger fabric of tools NFNH offers nurses who want to bring a more integrative approach into their practice. Our Functional Nutrition Certification (35 AHNA-approved CE hours, with an evening cohort opening October 19) goes deep on food as a clinical intervention. Yoga Foundations for Nurses applies the same "translate it for a clinical audience" approach to yoga and breathwork — useful for managing your own load as much as your patients'. And our GLP-1 Nutrition for Nurses workshop, available on-demand, gives you a focused, practical grounding in one of the fastest-moving areas in patient nutrition counseling right now.
Each of these stands on its own. Together, they start to look like a coherent way of practicing — one where non-pharmacological, whole-person tools sit alongside everything else in a nurse's toolkit, rather than off to the side of it.
Coming January 2027: the Integrative Nursing Certificate
That's exactly the idea behind what we're building next. Looking ahead, NFNH is preparing to launch its most comprehensive offering yet: the Integrative Nursing Certificate, arriving January 2027. Where our workshops and single-topic certifications let nurses go deep on one modality at a time — acupressure, nutrition, yoga, and more — this new 60-contact-hour, self-paced program is designed to bring those threads together into one coherent foundation in integrative nursing practice. It's for nurses who are ready to make holistic, whole-person care a defined and credentialed part of who they are professionally, not just something they pick up a workshop at a time. It's early days, and we'll share more details, including enrollment dates, as the January launch gets closer.
Where to start
If this is your first time hearing about acupressure as a bedside tool, Saturday's workshop is a low-cost, low-commitment way to find out whether it's for you. If you already know it is, the certificate starting September 19 is where the real depth lives. And if you're the kind of nurse who's already collecting workshops and wondering what they add up to — stay tuned. We're building the program that ties it all together, and we'd love for you to be part of it from the start.
Questions about any of these programs? Email us here.