About Hui-wen Sato, MSN, MPH, RN, CCRN

Hui-Wen (Alina) Sato, MSN, MPH, RN, CCRN, is a pediatric intensive care nurse in Southern California and blogs at http://heartofnursing.blog.

Primary Nursing of Medically Complex Children in the ICU Increases Parental Trust

Differing views about quality of life.

Photo by Pat Smith/Pexels

As medical care has become increasingly advanced in its ability to prolong life in the face of serious, chronic illness, it has also presented complicated challenges for both the caregivers and care-receivers alike. This holds especially true when we venture into the thorny, subjective realm of “quality of life.”

Sam was a patient with serious chronic illness and severe developmental disability who had been in and out of our pediatric ICU for many years. His most recent nine-month hospitalization had been the most frightening and uncertain thus far, and the gap between the perspectives of the medical team and Sam’s mom had became more apparent. The medical team speculated whether Sam was approaching the end of his life, while his mom asked us to continue doing all we could to maximize Sam’s physical longevity.

Unspoken questions also involved our struggle to measure what exactly comprises “enough” quality of life to justify the continued offering of health care resources. It’s an inevitable struggle with scarce resources and the monetization of quality of life, particularly with a chronically ill, severely disabled child who can feel so “other” to those of us living “normal” lives.

Parents come to our unit seeking […]

2022-09-14T10:01:23-04:00September 14th, 2022|family experience, nursing roles, pediatrics|1 Comment
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Loss from Nurse Attrition Goes Deeper than Numbers

On watching familiar colleagues leave your unit. 

Photo by Javier Allegue/ Unsplash

It feels as though every week, I hear of yet another one to two colleagues who are leaving our pediatric ICU (PICU).

Reasons colleagues leave.

They’ve been at all kinds of experience levels. Some have only been in our unit for a couple of years, and some have been with us for anywhere from eight to 15 years. Some leave because they realize as young nurses that they don’t want to be around so much pediatric death and dying in the long-term, so they move on to other positions where they can care for healthier populations. Some leave because they’ve already been around so much pediatric death and dying for so long by now that it’s time to practice in different kinds of spaces for their own mental and emotional well-being. Some leave for the significantly higher pay offered by travel nurse positions, and some leave to be closer to family in other states. A smaller percentage leave quietly without ever really disclosing the reasons why.

Every departure hurts on a numbers level.

In a time when nurse staffing seems to be at critically low levels everywhere, raising our workload and stress levels to new all-time highs, every departure hurts on a sheer […]

2022-06-29T10:48:07-04:00June 29th, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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How to Support the Nurse in Your Life, May 2022

Photo by Dương Nhân from Pexels

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post directed towards friends and family members of nurses, entitled “How to Support the Nurse in Your Life.” While the ideas in that post still hold up today, so much in nursing has changed, the COVID pandemic being the obvious main factor. With nurses in more need of support than ever, I find it important to revisit this idea of helping friends and families supporting the nurses in their lives at this unique point in time.

1. Listen to what the nurse is actually distressed about in the moment, and stay with them there.

In normal, non-pandemic times, nurses already have many people, situations, and issues to tend to in addition to the actual patient. There are so many unique aspects of the nurse role that challenge us, all of them rolled into a tangled ball in the course of a 12-hour shift. If we are distressed about one particular aspect, please stay with us in your focus on the actual issue at hand so we have time and space to unpack it without all the other competing stressors vying for all our attention.

For example, we might be upset one […]

2022-05-02T09:19:45-04:00May 2nd, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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Finding Effective Means of Rest as a Nurse and Mother

When I had my first of two children almost nine years ago, I switched from full time (three 12-hour shifts per week) to part time (two 12-hour shifts per week). With my husband working four 10-hour days per week, this arrangement has allowed our family the incredible privilege of not needing childcare outside of the family.

That said, the arrangement also means that I as a nurse and mother have very little opportunity to rest. When I’m at work, all cylinders are operating on high alert in every way—mental, physical, social, emotional, and spiritual. When I’m home, I am keeping tabs on everyone’s physical, social, emotional and spiritual needs. I’m managing the housework, trying to keep track of groceries, struggling with creative and healthy meal prep, and caring for a complicated dog and two less complicated tortoises. My husband and I are deeply involved in our church community and trying to faithfully maintain friendships. I have various speaking engagements to prepare for. Life is incredibly full.

In the midst of life’s ongoing demands, I’ve had to become smarter about approaches to downtime and venues of rest that are actually restorative.

Beware of default mode.

As much as I find cleanliness and organization in my home to be refreshing and calming in their […]

2022-04-13T13:02:18-04:00April 13th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Can Grieving Loss of Idealism in Nursing Give Room for New Hope?

It is no secret by now that the pandemic has dealt blows to morale in nurses like never before. The issues are being voiced everywhere—nurses find themselves overworked, understaffed, underpaid, disrespected by both the health care system and many in the general public, in sometimes deeply startling ways.

As professionals who come to work every day looking to help, restore, and heal, we found ourselves losing our idealism about our profession. On top of our ongoing grief over our patients—both COVID and non-COVID related—we’ve also felt the loss of watching increasing numbers of beloved colleagues either leave the profession or leave our units, often because of preexisting issues highlighted by the stresses of the pandemic.

This is not at all to say that their reasons for leaving are wrong. It’s only to say that those of us who stay feel the grief of seeing them leave and wonder anew about our own longevity in this work, even as we support their decisions and wish them well.

Four motivations that have kept me in nursing.

This has left me inevitably asking myself why I still stay. My motivations for staying in this work and in my current workplace are:

  1. To provide meaningful, helpful care to my patients and families.
  2. To work in a supportive environment that is life-giving and […]
2022-01-28T09:57:59-05:00January 28th, 2022|Nursing|0 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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