Nurse Burnout Recovery: Healing Ourselves to Better Serve Patients

Shedding parts of us that no longer serve us.

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

A couple months ago, I shared my experience with burnout and lessons learned from it. This experience propelled me into a healing journey. This healing journey wasn’t just about a newfound appreciation for “self-care.” Guided by several mentors, coaches, and healers, it incorporated modalities such as energy healing, spiritual healing, mindset work, inner child work, meditation, breathwork, and journaling. Burnout had initiated an intense deconstruction and deprogramming process that made it clear it was time to shed the pieces of me that were no longer serving me.

During this healing journey I asked myself:

  • Why do I do what I do?
  • Why do I feel that I’m not good enough/smart enough/skilled enough to take care of my patients?
  • Why do I feel like I can’t prioritize myself and my own needs so I can take better care of my patients?
  • Why do I feel like it’s not safe to speak up if I have a concern?
  • Why am I afraid to fail?

After being brutally honest with myself, I realized I had to go back to where the programming began.

Confronting our fears.

As […]

2023-10-02T09:38:34-04:00October 2nd, 2023|Nursing, nursing perspective, wellness|1 Comment
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Prioritizing Assessment of Postoperative Movement-Evoked Pain

It hurts to move.

Staja Booker, PhD, RN

It’s 10:00, 15 hours postoperative, and your patient has eaten breakfast and is resting comfortably in bed. You ask the patient, “On a scale of zero to 10, how much pain are you having right now?” The patient replies “zero, as long as I don’t move.” The nurse documents the pain score as 0/10 and continues their rounds.

Most nurses are happy when patients report no pain. What is the nurse missing? The contextual factor called movement.

Several years ago, a research participant told me, “Ain’t no sense in getting up to hurt.” A very simple yet powerful statement began my quest to shift how we understand and assess the dynamics between pain and movement.

The realities are:

  • Movement increases acute pain postoperatively, and most patients are afraid to move even when the importance of ambulation is known.
  • Most patients need some type of pain medication or non-pharmacological intervention to engage in mobility-related activities.
  • Movement and mobility enhance recovery and rehabilitation.
  • Movement-evoked pain is as a major barrier to participating in activity-based interventions.

Movement-evoked pain is an important pain characteristic that describes pain and discomfort during active or passive motion of the affected area. Yet, despite awareness among nurses of the importance of setting function-related pain goals, most of our pain assessments are performed […]

2023-07-31T09:32:18-04:00July 31st, 2023|Nursing, patient engagement, patient experience|0 Comments
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Recommended Reading from the August Issue of AJN

The August issue of AJN is now live.

“Nursing Care for Patients After Ostomy Surgery,” a CE feature, details the basics of pre- and postoperative care and patient education for colostomy and ileostomy—two of the most common types of ostomy surgery.

This month’s Original Research article is on nurses’ self-reported QI engagement and competence. Also see “Cultivating Quality: Reducing Tubing and Device Connections” to learn about a nurse-led QI project that explored misconnection prevention strategies.

“Fostering Race-Based Conversations in Nursing,” our latest Focus on DEI column, discusses ways to address racism and promote cultural competence.

AJN Reports examines the unintended consequences of online health care portals, noting that:

Although patient portals are designed to help with the management of personal health information, their proliferation may also be creating barriers to care for some people.

See also the extensive health care news sections, the Journal Watch and Drug Watch sections, a new installment in our series on palliative nursing, and a Reflections essay on how a school nurse compassionately cared for the author when she became pregnant at age 15—and whose kindness inspired the author to eventually become a […]

2023-07-27T10:05:09-04:00July 27th, 2023|Nursing|0 Comments
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The Face of Burnout in Nursing: My Personal Story and Lessons Learned

Woman looking at ocean at sunset Photo by Artem Kovalev on Unsplash

Two-and-a-half years ago, I experienced severe burnout in my role as a night shift charge nurse in a cardiovascular ICU. This blog post shares my personal story, highlighting the common ingredients of burnout and the challenges I faced. Through this experience, I learned valuable lessons that can benefit both nurses and the health care industry as a whole.

Where it All Began

Transitioning from a clinical nurse educator to a night shift charge nurse in a new cardiovascular ICU was an exciting opportunity for me. However, it soon became overwhelming due to various factors. These included a surgeon I didn’t see eye-to-eye with, moral and ethical dilemmas in patient care, staffing challenges, and a hostile work environment created by lateral violence from coworkers.

Strained to the Breaking Point

As my anxiety grew, I struggled to meet expectations each night. While prioritizing patient care and my night shift team, I feared for our patients’ well-being. Frequently, we were overloaded with acute post-cardiothoracic surgery patients. Despite my efforts to manage admissions responsibly, I faced constant pressure. Doubts crept in, and I lost trust in myself and my ability to provide safe care.

The emotional toll […]

2023-07-13T11:32:42-04:00July 13th, 2023|career, Nursing, nursing career, nursing stories, patient safety|3 Comments
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Preventable and Aggressive Care for Cancer Patients: To the Bitter End

There have been a couple of recent studies that confirm what I have observed as a palliative care nurse practitioner (NP) in an academic medical center: that there’s still a tendency to pursue very aggressive care with older people with cancer. While every situation is different, the evidence shows that people with cancer could also benefit from palliative care and advance care planning to make sure they’re getting the best and right care for them.

Palliative care could prevent many ED visits.

The first study to catch my eye as a former ED nurse was Trends and Characteristics of Potentially Preventable Emergency Department (ED) Visits Among Patients With Cancer in the US. This study reviewed data on almost a billion (854,911,106) ED visits, of which 4.2% were made by patients with cancer. The mean age of those patients, not surprisingly, was 66. The study found that more than half of ED visits among patients with cancer, 51.6%, were identified as potentially preventable, with the absolute number of potentially preventable ED visits increasing substantially between 2012 and 2019.

The authors concluded that this highlights “the need for cancer care programs to implement evidence-based interventions to better manage cancer treatment complications, such as uncontrolled pain, in outpatient and ambulatory settings.”

This […]

2023-04-07T09:34:11-04:00April 7th, 2023|end of life, Nursing, palliative care, patient experience, Patients|2 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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