The nurses are exhausted. Can hospitals change in time to keep them?
The pandemic has taken already stressed nurses away from a demanding field. Does work need to be redesigned?
Calling It Quits is a series about today's quitting culture.
One morning in the fall of 2020, Francesca Camacho left her 12-hour night shift as an intensive care nurse at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and attempted to reach the freeway. The day's work, in his words, was "just very terrible". This was not uncommon at the time: the Cook County area was experiencing the highest levels of Covid hospitalizations it had ever seen, surpassed only by the wave of Omicron variants the following year. /p>
She was on the phone with her parents, a ritual she had developed to decompress after a shift, when she noticed what appeared to be a teenage driver ahead her.
"I remember thinking, what is this girl doing that justifies her not letting me in?" Ms. Camacho, now 27, called back. "And I just felt this surge of rage." She hung up the phone and screamed and cried the rest of the way home.
The next day she asked her colleagues if something similar had already happened to them. ; they all said yes. Lunchtime therapy sessions with other nurses turned into professional therapy sessions. "It was really a feeling of anger that I felt, and I think deep down it was just a terrible sadness about what I was seeing and what we were all going through," she said. recently.
Last August, she quit her job. She is now a freshman law student at Boston University and plans to use her law degree to advocate for change in the medical field.
The Burnout has always been a part of nursing, an effect of working long hours in physically and often emotionally taxing environments. The Covid pandemic has exacerbated these factors and added some: understaffing, an increase in violence and hostility towards healthcare workers over masking mandates, and an increase in deaths, especially in the first months of the pandemic. In a study by the American Nurses Foundation, published last month, 57% of 12,581 nurses surveyed said they had felt "burned out" in the past two weeks, and 43% said they had felt "burned out" . Only 20% said they felt valued. (These numbers were largely constant throughout the pandemic.)
"Burnout and our current issues have been going on for decades," said Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the 'American Association of Nurses. “So what have we learned from the past two years? That we need to ensure that we implement programs and processes to reduce burnout and improve the work environment. Because Covid is not the last pandemic, nor the last major problem to occur. ”
For some, these well-meaning changes may not come soon enough: People interviewed by the American Nurses Foundation said they were at least considering changing their 'job. Some, like Ms. Camacho, left the profession. Others change roles.
The pandemic has taken already stressed nurses away from a demanding field. Does work need to be redesigned?
Calling It Quits is a series about today's quitting culture.
One morning in the fall of 2020, Francesca Camacho left her 12-hour night shift as an intensive care nurse at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and attempted to reach the freeway. The day's work, in his words, was "just very terrible". This was not uncommon at the time: the Cook County area was experiencing the highest levels of Covid hospitalizations it had ever seen, surpassed only by the wave of Omicron variants the following year. /p>
She was on the phone with her parents, a ritual she had developed to decompress after a shift, when she noticed what appeared to be a teenage driver ahead her.
"I remember thinking, what is this girl doing that justifies her not letting me in?" Ms. Camacho, now 27, called back. "And I just felt this surge of rage." She hung up the phone and screamed and cried the rest of the way home.
The next day she asked her colleagues if something similar had already happened to them. ; they all said yes. Lunchtime therapy sessions with other nurses turned into professional therapy sessions. "It was really a feeling of anger that I felt, and I think deep down it was just a terrible sadness about what I was seeing and what we were all going through," she said. recently.
Last August, she quit her job. She is now a freshman law student at Boston University and plans to use her law degree to advocate for change in the medical field.
The Burnout has always been a part of nursing, an effect of working long hours in physically and often emotionally taxing environments. The Covid pandemic has exacerbated these factors and added some: understaffing, an increase in violence and hostility towards healthcare workers over masking mandates, and an increase in deaths, especially in the first months of the pandemic. In a study by the American Nurses Foundation, published last month, 57% of 12,581 nurses surveyed said they had felt "burned out" in the past two weeks, and 43% said they had felt "burned out" . Only 20% said they felt valued. (These numbers were largely constant throughout the pandemic.)
"Burnout and our current issues have been going on for decades," said Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the 'American Association of Nurses. “So what have we learned from the past two years? That we need to ensure that we implement programs and processes to reduce burnout and improve the work environment. Because Covid is not the last pandemic, nor the last major problem to occur. ”
For some, these well-meaning changes may not come soon enough: People interviewed by the American Nurses Foundation said they were at least considering changing their 'job. Some, like Ms. Camacho, left the profession. Others change roles.
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