Addressing Health Care Worker Trauma with an Off-Site, Overnight Workshop

Everyone experiences loss and other personal trauma, but those of us who work in health care are obliged to cope with our own personal grief and stress as well as witness the suffering and pain of our patients. Do these words ever describe you at the end of a shift at work?

” . . . angry . . . anxious . . . hopeless . . . stressed . . . depleted . . . depressed . . . frazzled . . . “

One health system gets serious.

There’s a lot of talk these days about addressing clinicians’ burnout, and in some workplaces staff now are offered a meditation room, or aromatherapy or massage.

But since 2013, Montefiore Health System in Bronx, New York, has seriously invested in their staff’s mental and emotional health by offering a two-day, off-site experiential and educational workshop twice a year. And by paying for the program, retreat center, and meals for all participants so that staff can attend for free.

In “Helping Care Providers and Staff Process Grief Through a Hospital-Based Program” in the July issue of AJN, Ronit Fallek and colleagues share their experiences in developing this program along with their analysis of feedback about its effectiveness. They offer enough detail to […]

2019-07-25T11:18:15-04:00July 25th, 2019|Nursing, nursing career, wellness|0 Comments
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In Nursing, ‘Joy’ and ‘Work’ Are Not Mutually Exclusive

No shortage of workplace pressures.

Photo by Mark Thomas/Science Photo Library.

In virtually any health care setting today, nurses are under pressure to increase efficiencies, improve quality, and cut costs. The nonstop pressure to always do better comes in the midst of staff shortages, repeated changes in clinical protocols, struggles with EHRs that are incompatible with our workflow, and even concerns for our own physical safety. It’s no surprise that nursing turnover rates are increasing.

With all of this raining down on our heads, is it really possible to experience joy at work?

In “Finding Joy in the Workplace” in this month’s issue (free until May 7), Rose Sherman and Cynthia Blum tell us that it is. And, they argue, the work experience of nurses influences the quality of their interactions with patients:

If clinicians don’t feel hope, confidence, and psychological safety in their work, they can’t in turn offer these to their patients.

An evidence-based framework for improving joy.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) is known to most of us as an organization that focuses on patient safety issues like CLABSIs, surgical site infections, falls, and medication errors. But increasingly concerned about clinician burnout (which is, after all, a patient safety issue), in […]

2019-04-24T09:26:18-04:00April 24th, 2019|career, Nursing, wellness|0 Comments
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The ECRI Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns of 2019

A list grounded in data and expert opinion.

Atlantic Training/Wikimedia Commons

Each year, ECRI Institute creates a list of top 10 patient safety concerns in order “to support organizations in their efforts to proactively identify and respond to threats to patient safety.”

The list isn’t generated out of thin air. The ECRI Institute relies both on data regarding events and concerns and on expert judgment. Since 2009, ECRI and partner patient safety organizations “have received more than 2.8 million event reports.”

2019 Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns

  1. Diagnostic Stewardship and Test Result Management Using EHRs
  2. Antimicrobial Stewardship in Physician Practices and Aging Services
  3. Burnout and Its Impact on Patient Safety
  4. Patient Safety Concerns Involving Mobile Health
  5. Reducing Discomfort with Behavioral Health
  6. Detecting Changes in a Patient’s Condition
  7. Developing and Maintaining Skills
  8. Early Recognition of Sepsis across the Continuum
  9. Infections from Peripherally Inserted IV Lines
  10. Standardizing Safety Efforts across Large Health System

[…]

2019-04-15T08:16:15-04:00April 15th, 2019|digital health, Nursing, patient safety, Patients|0 Comments
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Suicide Among Nurses: Poorly Documented and Unacknowledged

Photo © Wavebreakmedia Ltd UC25/ Alamy Stock Photo

When we all worked eight-hour shifts, “my” shift was evenings. Most nights I reported off to the same night nurse, a woman about my age who was an excellent nurse and also simply a nice person to be with. One evening I came to work to learn that my new friend would not be at work for a while. She had tried to kill herself.

A surprising lack of suicide data for nurses.

Did you know that there are national data on the suicide rates of physicians, teachers, police officers, firefighters, and military personnel, but none pertaining to suicides of nurses? Or that many hospitals have long offered screening for suicide risk to medical staff and medical students, but not to nurses? The lead news story in this month’s AJN, “Suicide Among Nurses,” highlights these and other findings of a recent National Academy of Medicine discussion paper, “Nurse Suicide: Breaking the Silence.”

Many reasons for this silence.

Judy Davidson, a nurse scientist at the University of California San Diego and the lead author of this paper, points out that there are many reasons for the silence around this issue. She notes that suicide data in general are […]

2018-08-20T09:32:01-04:00August 20th, 2018|Nursing|2 Comments
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Wabi-Sabi: Nursing and the Art of Brokenness

Wabi-Sabi (Kintsugi), watercolor and acrylic on paper, 2018 by Julianna Paradisi

Nursing is the art of healing, which ironically also makes it an art of brokenness. We pack and bind wounds. We administer medications to cure disease. We offer interventions for the side effects caused by the medication administered to cure.

We work in a health care system which, despite our best intentions, is broken: not enough resources, not enough staff or providers, not enough health care to go around for everyone.

Nurses have broken areas within ourselves too, but our work environments expect us to perform as perfectly as possible, amidst the brokenness of our patients, the brokenness of health care.

Patients, physicians, other departments, and hospital administrators expect nurses will fix problems, whatever they are, despite the brokenness.

A timely example this flu season is the paradoxical message: “Don’t come to work sick,” coupled with the implication, “Your sick call leaves us understaffed.”

The answer to brokenness is wholeheartedness.

The effort to fix the brokenness or imperfection of nursing and health care may be particularly exhausting for nurses because we are directly responsible for the safety of our patients.

The words of author David Whyte as he recounts a wise friend’s advice elegantly express […]

2018-02-14T10:05:33-05:00February 14th, 2018|healthcare social media, Nursing, nursing perspective|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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