Welcome!

Welcome! I am a Registered Nurse in the Midwest. I have worked as a nurse for over 4 years and very early on I suffered from depression and burnout related to my job. This blog hopes to help primarily nurses but anyone really who is finding themselves burnt out at their job and stressed out in their life. I am glad you found this page and hope it offers you some encouragement today.

Whatever your role is in healthcare - CNA, MA, RN, MD, insert your abbreviation - our work is about helping others. It's my belief that those who make the greatest difference in healthcare are those who come to work wanting to be useful to the team and helpful to their patients.
But despite the seeming simplicity of that belief many of us working in healthcare today are burnt out, stressed out, and checked out.

 

Nursing is not an easy profession and anyone who says it is has never been a nurse.

• Nursing is dangerous. Nurses are verbally abused and physically assaulted by their patients and/or patient visitors. A couple years ago I was unfortunately assaulted by a patient and the response of many inside and outside my place of work was "You're a real nurse now." Let me make something clear: Workplace violence is NOT part of the job. When the culture has come to assume that you will be assaulted, and then justified that assault as a way of "earning your stripes" - it's a flashing firework that something in that culture needs to change.
• Nursing is exhausting. Mentally, emotionally, physically EXHAUSTING. It takes a lot to be responsible for the physical, emotional, and mental safety of ill/sick/compromised people. It takes a lot to manage the expectations of one's professional duty with the expectations of patients, patients family, doctors, other nurses, The Law, their own ethics, their personal life responsibilities- etc. Being a nurse is like nothing else. What a nurse does or fails to do, can be the difference between life and death for their patients and even other members of the healthcare team. More on that later.
• Nursing is 24/7. Everyone likes to think the doctor is available 24/7 but that just not the reality. It's a nurse who is assessing, identifying changes, make a plan, acting out an intervention, evaluating the success or failure of that intervention and determining the next course of action - rapidly and constantly. There is no break in this for most staff floor nurses. Many go without lunch, sometimes even peeing, in the course of a 12 hour shift because their dedication and the demand upon them is so great. Nurses are present at the bedside every evening, night, weekend, and holiday.
• Nursing requires sacrifice. Nurses are expected to show up for work and give all to their patients. I am not saying this expectation is fair or even right but that is the expectation. You will grab that soda with a smile, you will give that narcotic when it is demanded, you will round on every patient every hour while completing a two hour admission while simultaneously completing a complex discharge. Nursing currently demands great self-sacrifice because the primary focus of nursing is on everyone else's wellbeing and never on the nurse herself. Impossible is not a word that is accepted in the profession of nursing.

But that is where things are going to have to change. Because currently, and I can personally attest to this, the demands placed on nurses (and healthcare workers in general) are impossible. The demands are impossible not because they aren't noble or ethical or moral or compassionate - good intentions are good! - but because those on whom these great demands are placed have not been given the professional and personal tools to deal with stress, conflict, burnout, and change.

Together let's change that. Together let's explore the profession of nursing - its pitfalls and its peaks, its triumphs and its failures. Together let's journey into filling our own cup first so we can do the work of filling the cups of others.