Tallying Losses and Gains of Being a Nurse, and Finding Profit

I was talking with a dear friend who was telling me how she went through a period when she had wondered whether nursing was destroying her. I can’t say what she actually meant by this for her own self, but the comment stood out to me. I found myself chewing on this notion that we can feel slowly worn down by the overall experience of nursing to a point where we feel the losses are not being offset by the gains quickly enough.

A certain loss of innocence.

Given all of the random tragedy, self-sabotage, and violence that nurses may witness in their patients’ stories, nurses can experience the loss of a more innocent, optimistic perspective about people and the world. Nurses often say there are things you cannot “un-see” in this line of work. Those experiences can darken the lens through which we see the world. The loss of faith in the assured wellness in the world can feel disheartening. It can be difficult to know how to process this in a way that does not simply leave us more fearful or cynical people.

The energy drain.

On a less philosophical level, it […]

2018-01-18T10:04:58-05:00January 5th, 2018|healthcare social media, Nursing, writing|2 Comments
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Report Draws Attention to Nurse Burnout, Seeks to Restore Joy to Profession

AJN has been asked to share with our readers a new report on nurse burnout: “A Gold Bond to Restore Joy to Nursing: A Collaborative Exchange of Ideas to Address Burnout” (pdf). The report is the result of a November 2016 retreat of leading thinkers in health care and nursing at the Johnson Foundation’s Wingspread campus in Racine, Wisconsin.

Among conference participants well known to AJN were Cynda Rushton, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and Berman Institute of Bioethics, and noted author and nurse Theresa Brown.

The post below detailing the report’s findings is by Cindy Richards of QPatient Insight, the consulting firm that organized the conference. An experienced journalist, she worked closely with conference attendees to prepare the report on the conference’s findings.

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We often hear that America faces a nursing shortage—the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics said in 2015 that we would need 1.2 million more registered nurses by 2024. In addition, surveys of nurses continue to find high levels of job dissatisfaction and high percentages of nurses who express an intention to change jobs or leave the profession in the coming years.

Why? In too many cases, because they are overwhelmed by demands that get […]

2017-05-03T11:40:29-04:00May 3rd, 2017|Nursing|5 Comments
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Reluctant Heroes: When Men in Nursing Cry

Reluctant Hero / graphite, charcoal, and pastel on paper / by Julianna Paradisi 2017

I first learned the effect a man’s tears have on my emotions from the parents of my young patients when I was a pediatric intensive care nurse.

I am not unaffected by the tears of a woman, but in the PICU the tears of the mothers differed in nature from the tears of the fathers.

A mother with a hospitalized child will cry, and when overwhelmed, she will break down. But in the PICU, more often than not, she took a tissue from the box I handed her, wiped her eyes, breathed deeply, and then put on a brave face to protect her child from knowing her fear and concern over his welfare.

When the father cried, it was an admission of helplessness. His problem-solving toolbox was empty. The tears represented feelings of personal failure, powerlessness to protect his child and family from disease or trauma. His criteria for being a father, or a man, was eroded.

These displays of total soul-brokenness undid me every time. […]

2017-01-18T10:32:08-05:00January 17th, 2017|career, men in nursing, Nursing|6 Comments
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All Saints’ Day Blessing for Health Care Providers

Autumn Angel / photo by Julianna Paradisi 2016 Autumn Angel / photo by Julianna Paradisi 2016

November is the strangest of months. Its days are shorter, darker. It begins with All Saints’ Day, a day of remembering our dead, of loss and grief, followed late in the month by Thanksgiving, America’s celebration of abundance with gratitude.

This year on All Saints’ Day I attended a discussion of health care professionals. The audience included nurses, physicians, pharmacists, social workers, and hospital administrators. The conversation ultimately centered on the emotional difficulties of patient care.

It wasn’t a debriefing as much as collective acknowledgment that, rather than accepting help, some patients or their family members view us as the enemy, sometimes disrupting our best efforts in the name of misguided advocacy.

Nurses spoke of being labeled as “bad” and played against each other by angry patients or family members. Physicians related episodes of verbal abuse from patients or family members demanding inappropriate procedures, medications, or dosing. Some spoke of needing to take refuge to center their thoughts before ordering the appropriate care.

Like most nurses, I’ve experienced similar treatment at the hands of difficult patients, but physicians don’t generally discuss with us how they are treated. Nurses and physicians suffer silently, instead of lending support […]

2016-11-21T13:00:49-05:00November 10th, 2016|Nursing, Patients|1 Comment
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Adapting to the Emotional Toll of Nursing

take2refectionsillustrationsept2016New nurses may find themselves confronted with great human suffering, enormous technical challenges, and the norms and pressures of the nursing profession and the individual workplace.

Most eventually learn the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in the profession. But some may struggle more than others with the emotional intensity of the work. A question that seems to come up a lot when nurses write about their work goes something like this: How do you keep caring as a nurse and not get burned out? How do you develop a resilient professional persona?

This month’s Reflections essay, “How I Built a Suit of Armor (and Stayed Human),” by Jonathan Peter Robb, enumerates the challenges faced by a sensitive new nurse and the ways he found to protect himself over time. Here Robb, a district nurse for the National Health Service in London, England, describes one kind of challenge he faced:

The weight of being responsible for a person’s health wasn’t one I had prepared for. Sitting in lectures doesn’t train you for the moment when you’re standing at the end of a bed looking at a patient who is struggling to breathe, semiconscious (but who just last week was sitting up and talking), and thinking: Did I miss something? Is this my fault?

As Robb writes, “caring hurts.” Gradually […]

2016-11-21T13:00:58-05:00September 14th, 2016|Nursing, nursing perspective, Patients|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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