Healthcare Workers Still Love Their Jobs

[hppygr8ful]

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Heading into the third year of a wearying pandemic, America's health care workers report significant levels of burnout, even anger about the complications of politics and rising incidents of abuse from patients and their families.

Read in its entirety:

Exclusive: Angry and abused, health care workers still overwhelmingly love careers, poll shows

[Rogue1]

There is a big difference between what you do and how you are expected to do it.  I think we have to be really careful in separating those.  On my med/surg floor we have lost many long time staff, and they were all very conflicted about leaving--loving the job but not able to justify the working conditions anymore.  We have gotten new staff, but I would not be surprised if the attrition rate becomes even higher than before (it was bad enough baseline pre-covid).  Also, it is funny to see this post on the same home page as several 'quitting bedside' type posts. 

 

IMHO, if we want to continue doing what we love (and if we want the health care system overall to be healthy), it's up to bedside nurses to identify the stressors and to articulate to upper management proposed solutions in terms of altering structures, systems, and processes.  (Or unionize, and force the changes that way.)  Nurse/patient ratios are a big one, but there are others, too.  I have had enough of being told to take care of myself as the solution.  It's not.  The solution is to change the structures, systems, and processes.

3 hours ago, Rogue1 said:

There is a big difference between what you do and how you are expected to do it.  I think we have to be really careful in separating those.  On my med/surg floor we have lost many long time staff, and they were all very conflicted about leaving--loving the job but not able to justify the working conditions anymore.  We have gotten new staff, but I would not be surprised if the attrition rate becomes even higher than before (it was bad enough baseline pre-covid).  Also, it is funny to see this post on the same home page as several 'quitting bedside' type posts. 

 

IMHO, if we want to continue doing what we love (and if we want the health care system overall to be healthy), it's up to bedside nurses to identify the stressors and to articulate to upper management proposed solutions in terms of altering structures, systems, and processes.  (Or unionize, and force the changes that way.)  Nurse/patient ratios are a big one, but there are others, too.  I have had enough of being told to take care of myself as the solution.  It's not.  The solution is to change the structures, systems, and processes.

Yep. 

This has been the objective of nursing activists since the 90s.  When the notion that RNs were expensive necessities rather than valuable assets infected our American health system the practice of minimal bedside staffing for profit margin objectives took wing. Nurses responded with data and research which directly correlated patient  time spent with an RN to positive health outcomes.  We got shared governance and a voice that was less compelling than the $$

This pandemic has shown our health system to be inefficient and fragmented and unsustainably expensive. 

 

[OUxPhys, BSN, RN]

I love my job now that Im away from bedside.