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.

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 […]
2022-01-28T09:57:59-05:00January 28th, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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The Gift of Feedback

By Giulia May/Unsplash

In a recent Schwartz Rounds session at my hospital, the facilitators centered the discussion around the theme, “The Gift of Feedback.” As I listened to the panelists share their experiences, I recalled two recent exchanges with colleagues I’ve developed positive working relationships with over the years.

One was with a hardworking care partner (CP) who has been in our unit for about six years. The other exchange was with an attending physician who had been a well-respected leader in our PICU long before my 11 years working there. I find both to be very kind and very professional.

Asking a care partner for feedback.

As one of the more experienced bedside nurses in our unit, about once every four to six weeks I fill the role of relief charge nurse. I’ve done it enough over the years to feel decently comfortable in the role, but I do it so infrequently that each time I find myself relearning aspects of the role.

The charge nurse always sits in the same station as the care partner who manages the front desk. This individual gets a close-up view of how all the different relief charge nurses handle the role. One day towards the end of a busy shift, I turned […]

2021-12-17T13:21:05-05:00December 17th, 2021|career, Nursing, nursing career|0 Comments
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Precepting: Revisiting Ground Rules with My New Grad RN

A return to precepting.

By Suzanne D. Williams/Unsplash

There is no question that precepting new grad RNs requires a lot of extra thought, time, and energy for bedside nurses also looking to take care of our patients and their family members. But even as an introvert who finds it challenging to talk nearly nonstop for an entire 12-hour shift, I have in the past still enjoyed precepting. I’ve found it deeply rewarding to watch someone under my mentorship grow in skill and confidence as a young nurse.

When the pandemic hit and sent my young children home for distance learning, I took a break from precepting, as my capacity for additional mentoring at work had shrunk significantly.

Now that my children are back on their school campus, I am preparing to precept a new grad who is part of a cohort that went through nursing school during a pandemic with considerable limitations to their clinical experiences. As I dust off my own preceptor hat, I have found myself revisiting what I want to lay out as a foundation for my new preceptee. […]

2021-10-14T09:47:10-04:00October 14th, 2021|career, new nurses, Nursing, nursing career|3 Comments
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A Plea for Help in Making Nursing Sustainable

by Casey Horner/via Unsplash

My hairdresser made a comment that I hear from a lot of people who are not in health care.

“I don’t know how you do a full 12-hour shift when it’s life-and-death work. I mean, I have long days working too, but cutting and styling hair isn’t life and death. I just can’t understand how you do it.”

I smiled and shrugged, as I usually do.

“Thanks for recognizing that. I don’t know. We get used to it, and we have a certain flow at work, even when it gets crazy. Plus it cuts down on the number of days I have to commute to work since I get so many hours in in one day.”

I had so much more to say, but that wasn’t the place for it. This is.

It’s true that at our core, we nurses are just wired to do this kind of work and we can push through it beyond a standard eight-hour work day. It also works well for consistency in ICU patient care to only have one changeover of the patient’s nurse from one 12-hour day shift to the incoming 12-hour night shift. We have generally found ways to ride the waves of an especially high census mixed with especially sick patients, typically followed […]

2021-08-19T16:46:41-04:00July 29th, 2021|health care policy, Nursing, nursing career, Public health, safe staffing|5 Comments
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How I Would Prepare My Child to Become a Nurse

‘Mommy, do you like your job?’

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels

My five- and seven-year-old daughters are now old enough to understand that Mommy has a job as a nurse where she takes care of some pretty sick patients. From what I gather, their young minds really only seem to grasp that sometimes Mommy comforts her patients when they don’t feel well. As much as I would love to explain to them that my work as a pediatric ICU nurse is much more complicated and challenging than this, I also don’t mind them seeing me as someone who comforts others as a key part of my job.

But lately my five-year-old has started asking me more questions about my job: “What kind of patient did you take care of? How was your day at work? Do you like your job?” As one with a strong disdain for fluffy answers, even to a five-year-old, I’ve found myself considering how to answer her in a way that is both age-appropriate and honest.

When she asked if I liked my job, I thought about my patient writhing in agony yesterday—his loving parent present in the room—as we struggled to perform necessary interventions while also looking […]

2021-05-03T09:46:09-04:00May 3rd, 2021|Nursing|5 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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