A Time to Heal: Taking a Break from Nursing After a Cancer Diagnosis

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

Most nurses I know enjoy Nurses Week as an acknowledgment of the very important work we do every day. Nurses’ Week can also be an opportunity to think about our own needs, or to practice “self-care,” a term I find problematic because I worry it has become one of those ideas that nurses get blamed for the absence of, as in, a nurse is stressed on the job because he hasn’t done his “self-care.” However, regardless of how management discusses “self-care,” it’s an important idea: that nurses need breaks, moments to relax, have fun, and nourish our own humanity so that we come to work ready to humanely care for patients.

The problem with doing a hard job, like nursing, is that recovery is hard, too, and when the job itself seems to expect employees to be superhuman, finding the will to really care for ourselves can be difficult. I discovered how truly challenging that can be after being diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in September 2017. At the time I was working as a per diem home hospice nurse and I knew instinctively that I could not care well for dying patients when I was […]

2022-05-09T09:20:58-04:00May 9th, 2022|Nursing|0 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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Time to Stop Proving Burnout Exists and Start Researching Real Solutions

“Put simply, we know burnout exists and we know it’s getting worse. Let’s leave it at that and move forward. Let’s focus on what we know might mitigate burnout…”

That’s from this month’s Viewpoint, “Burnout Research at a Crossroads,” by Tim Cunningham and Sharon Pappas. Some readers may find it a relief to have this stated so baldly: let’s move on to solutions, say the authors. Let’s put research dollars, time, and energy behind the search for clearer information about what works and what doesn’t.

A two-pronged approach.

The authors see a crucial and legitimate place for investigation of what works and what doesn’t in wellness initiatives to support “personal resilience” through self-care (an increasingly nebulous term in itself).

But they caution against shifting the responsibility onto nurses’ shoulders and ignoring real systemic issues.

With this in mind, they call for research that first of all examines systemic factors:

“It’s only commonsensical that burnout and work experience are intimately tied. It’s time to look more closely at staffing, work hours, team nursing, equitable pay, and other work environment factors that may decrease burnout.”

[…]

2022-04-29T15:08:45-04:00April 28th, 2022|Nursing, nursing research, safe staffing|1 Comment
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A Call for a More Balanced Approach to Family Presence During a Public Health Emergency

What would you want for your family?

Nine years ago, AJN published a Viewpoint article asserting the essential role of family caregivers. The article featured an elderly woman recuperating in a hospital, her daughter at her bedside planning for discharge with the care team. The authors argued that family engagement creates the foundation for safer care, better patient outcomes, and greater efficiency for nurses.

The same patient’s experience would likely have been very different during the Covid pandemic, especially during the intermittent surges over the past two years. The patient would be alone in the hospital, her daughter’s assurances communicated through a digital tablet. Overstretched nurses would provide updates to the family over the phone. Discharge education would occur through a car window moments before the patient’s daughter drove her home, feeling unprepared for what came next.

COVID-19’s highly transmissible properties have complicated the family engagement equation. Over the past two years, hospitals and nursing homes have enacted, eased up on, and then reinstated visitation bans, at times leaving questions as to whether restrictions implemented to reduce disease spread may be more detrimental than beneficial.

As we contended in recent months with the extremely contagious Omicron variant, family caregivers who had assumed an essential role as advocate, […]

2022-03-02T10:21:04-05:00March 2nd, 2022|Nursing|2 Comments
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The Particular Pain and Challenge of Educating Patients During a Worldwide Pandemic

Working in a rural community access hospital during the pandemic has been a struggle. Here as in many areas of the U.S., many in the surrounding community have not accepted the the existence of a virus like Covid-19. Against the backdrop of this widespread disbelief in the reality of the virus, the “government-mandated” vaccine was a final straw for many.

Many of these patients wholeheartedly believe that the vaccine is the “mark of the beast” mentioned in the Book of Revelation and that this is the beginning of the end of the world, with getting the vaccine understood as an expression of loyalty to Satan.

This belief is shared by various religious groups in other areas of our country. Many patients in our community also believe the vaccine is made with stem cells and fetal tissue and includes microchips. There are widely circulated rumors of tracking devices in the vaccine itself.

How do we as nurses and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) educate patients on the science of vaccinations in the face of the anger and passion we experience daily from a suspicious community?

The many other strains on nurses.

It hasn’t helped that nurses and APRNs alike have had to deal with more than they bargained for on many levels in […]

2022-02-24T14:38:16-05:00February 24th, 2022|Nursing, patient engagement, Public health|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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