About Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, FAAN, editor-in-chief (emerita)

Editor-in-chief, (emerita), AJN

What Can We Do About Addressing Nurse Exhaustion?

“Even when good workplace policies and support exist, without enough staff to meet essential patient needs, nurse fatigue cannot be properly addressed.”

Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash

When I was working as an ED nurse, if a colleague was out sick we’d invariably be asked to work a double shift—so, 16 hours instead of our usual eight-hour shift. It wasn’t bad as a one-time occurrence. But I can’t imagine how nurses have managed working five or more days of 12-hour shifts in a row, or even more, during the surges of Covid-19 patients needing hospitalization in various parts of this country. It’s no wonder there are so many stories and reports of nurses leaving the acute care setting.

While the obvious answer is that there needs to be more staff to share the work, not only to improve staff well-being but also to make care safer—and this is not a COVID-induced phenomena; we’ve known this for years thanks to research by Linda Aiken and others—getting that to happen has largely been unsuccessful.

Hospitals staff conservatively as a policy, causing many to be short-staffed on an almost ongoing basis. This makes for a stressful work environment that in turn causes nurses to leave, thus further […]

2021-12-03T09:51:29-05:00December 3rd, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Looking for Positive Things As We Near Thanksgiving

As we near Thanksgiving, I increasingly find myself looking for positive things—partly to help diminish my sadness about the still-mounting COVID-19 deaths and the nearly universal strain that everyone, perhaps especially those in health care, seems to be feeling.

As I wrote in last November’s editorial:

“Though I’m by no means a Pollyanna, I do believe incessant dwelling on the negatives doesn’t help any of us; we also need to examine the positives. I recall how exhausting it was to work a long, hard shift alongside someone who complained about everything. The negativity colored my own perceptions and stayed with me well after the shift ended. Conversely, working with colleagues who offered support and voiced a “we will get through this” attitude inspired confidence and optimism. My first nurse manager in the ED was superb at this, especially during some very harrowing shifts.” […]

2021-11-23T15:17:39-05:00November 23rd, 2021|wellness|0 Comments
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Helping Older Adults Get the Care That Matters to Them

Family caregivers should be partners in caring when family members are hospitalized.

“An estimated 41.8 million Americans were caregivers of an older adult relative or friend in 2020.” (From “The Four Ms of an Age-Friendly Health System” in AJN‘s November issue.)

That’s an impressive number, especially when one considers that any of the caregivers themselves may be older adults with chronic illness.

Are we preparing caregivers?

We ask a lot of these individuals, especially given the many complex tasks they are asked to perform, often with little or no training. And that’s nursing’s role—ensuring our patients are discharged to family members prepared to provide the care needed.

As a nurse, I felt prepared to be a caregiver for a family member who was discharged after complex cancer surgery. I was astonished at the brief discharge instructions for managing the Foley catheter, drains, and eight different medications; then I was handed a manila folder of papers about each medication. It took me a few hours to sort out schedules for medications and flushing drains.

But what about caregivers with no health care training, or who may not have manual dexterity or see clearly, or perhaps lack literacy at the level needed? Unfortunately, many hospitals are under resourced—in […]

2021-11-15T10:49:14-05:00November 15th, 2021|Nursing, Patients|0 Comments
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Nurses Don’t Seek Help When They Need It Most

Nurses with suicidal ideation are less likely to seek help. We need to change that.

The original research article in AJN‘s November issue should prompt concern among the nursing and broader health care community. The article, “Suicidal Ideation and Attitudes Toward Help Seeking in US Nurses Relative to the General Population,” describes the results of a survey sent to nearly 87,000 members of the American Nurses Association (ANA) in late 2017. It provides essential pre-pandemic data which can serve as a post-pandemic baseline going forward.

Higher prevalence of suicidal ideation in nurses.

Of the 7,378 nurses who responded (over 47% were hospital based), 5.5% reported suicidal thoughts over the prior year. Over 43% “screened positive for depression symptoms.” When researchers compared nurses with almost 5,200 age-matched other types of workers, the prevalence of suicidal ideation was 5.8% for nurses, compared to 4.3% for other U.S. workers.

Perhaps of greatest concern is that while most nurses (85%) indicated they would seek help for emotional problems, of those reporting having had suicidal ideation, 72.6% said that they would “probably or definitely” seek help. According to the authors, this is similar to results from studies of physicians and medical students.

As caregivers, we often ignore our own needs and focus on those of others. […]

2021-11-04T09:35:44-04:00November 4th, 2021|Nursing|0 Comments
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Acute Care Nurses: An Endangered Species?

Our acute care settings are in crisis—staff are physically and emotionally exhausted. And many have decided they can’t take it anymore.

“At the virtual conference of the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL) in July, researcher Peter Buerhaus reported preliminary findings of his study on the impact of the pandemic on the nursing workforce. He reported that a phone survey of over 800 AONL members conducted in May revealed that more than 50% of hospital chief nurse officers were seeing “increased retirements, sick leave, and early exits, including among younger nurses.”— AJN Editorial, September 2021

It’s been no secret that the hospital work environment has been problematic for nurses and patients alike—we know stressed and worn-out clinicians make more errors, and patient care suffers. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine released Keeping Patients Safe: Transforming the Work Environment of Nurses, which discussed workplace staffing and processes as intrinsic to ensuring patient safety. More recently, the National Academy of Medicine published Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being (2019), which noted, “The job demands placed on clinicians are often greater than the job resources available to them; this imbalance can lead to burnout.”

2021-09-10T08:59:51-04:00September 9th, 2021|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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