I read Allnurses every day, rarely do I post. Over the past year or so I've been reading more and more about how hard "that first year of nursing" is and how many new nurses just can't handle it and are looking to get out. I understand.
As an old, seasoned nurse, now retired I have watched nursing get harder and harder, working with sicker and sicker patients with less resources. How long can this continue? I've read lately about nurses who need antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds just to be able to come to work each day. And we all nod and say that's just how nursing is now. I read about nurses who cry and dread each day that they have to come to work, working in fear of making a mistake. The horror, a human being might make a mistake. And then I read other nurses who say, "we should never make mistakes, we should triple/quadruple check everything we do because the poor patient should not be harmed in any way, ever." What utopia do they live in? And yet we have to drop everything that we are triple checking to run and get a family member an extra pillow or a soft drink or risk being reprimanded.
What other career puts such a burden on it's members? I can't think of any that routinely have members dreading to come to work and needing medications to get through a shift, maybe airtraffic controllers, or combat soldiers. I don't know.
And then we tell ourselves that we should be happy that we're lucky to have a job. Really? What is so lucky about this?
I started nursing 40 years ago on a busy labor and delivery unit. I was afraid at times. But there was a support system from the top down. Director of nursing, nursing supervisors, head nurses (they weren't called managers back then) and the shift charge nurse, everyone pulled together. I miss that. I left hospital bedside nursing 10 years ago because of the lack of support and teamwork, and the increasing focus on the patient "experience" versus a positive outcome of disease or injury.
I don't have an answer, well I do but for some reason, nurses I have known don't want to talk about solving problems for their profession. We're great at solving everyone else's problems but not our own. How long can this continue? I feel sorry for new nurses and for my older colleagues as well.
I am retired after 44 years of nursing. I loved my career! Had some wonderful opportunities during my nursing career. Bedside nursing was not my choice. I was fortunated to do 14 years of insurance case management. Loved being able to guide a patient's care to be sure he got the proper care to RTW. Then I completed my career with 5 years of hospice nursing. What a privilege to be with a patient in their last day, to be able to know you were able to provide the care they needed, the meds to keep pain at a minimum, and works as part of a team to help the patient and family thru this very emotional time in their lives. Loved nursing and would choose it again!
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
You get what you put in. Good times or bad times , you must press on. It's not for everyone , no job is but its only as hard as you make it.
You get what you put in. It isn't for everyone; no job is. But it is only as hard as you make it.
(Paraphrasing from Biosphere)
You may have crappy shifts -- everyone does -- but you suck it up and deal with it, and the next shift may be memorable in a GOOD way. I see too many nurses making it so much more difficult than it has to be.
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
I'm afraid compounding this problem is the sad fact that nurses can no longer get all their training on the job- in the 80's wen I was a CNA, it was still possible to learn at the side of your LPN nurse, and get all one's training from CNA through RN at your facility. NOW they have to do everything through a college program first, thanks to college lobbyists I guess, to route the money and increase the cost of education, and when CNA's are put "on the floor" they have to take quite a bit of time to reconcile te classroom and the textbook patients with reality. IE, too dang many patients. Not enough time. Smae with LPN's and RN's- those most they have had in their clinicals has been 2-4 patients so wen faced with 24, or 60 in a SNF for example, they are overwhelmed. They can only really learn their meds by heart by working with them daily, by rote, and looking them up constantly until they know them. That can take some time. Then once they get a load of the horrible management practices of so many hospitals, that will surely discourage them more. It can be a shock if you haven't learned this stuff and gotten used to the idea on te job.
In the 70s, when I graduated from nursing school, most new grads already knew most of what they needed to know from their diploma programs. It was we of the BSN variety who had to learn on the job. And we did. We also took home lists of drugs, diseases, treatments and medical terms we didn't know and studied at home. There is no reason why todays new CNAs and RNs cannot do the same. Make a list of what you need to learn, then go home after every shift and look stuff up. You have the advantage of a smart phone -- type in a few key words and you have access to the material in dozens of the heavy, dusty books that we had to search laboriously through to find what we needed to know.
Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
More nurses aides and better ratios would solve a lot of these problems. I wish unions would ask for these things instead of pay raises. Pay raises are nice but not at the expense of my sanity.
Unions are made up of people. If you don't like the contract your union negotiates, tell them so. Or better yet, step up and become part of the process of advocating for what you need/want.
I worked at the bedside in Labor and delivery for 27 years. I enjoyed witnessing 1000s of births. However, the bureaucracy that exists in Healthcare took the thrill of the moment away for me. I followed my initial dream of teaching and earned an MSN in Nursing Education. I ventured into the world of academia to teach in an ADN program. It is a rewarding experience to watch nursing students grow and pin them at pinning ceremony. However, we instructors take quite a beating from the students in their "I want it now" attitude. They bash US on our evaluations because they can.... Nurse educators are becoming few and far between. It is hard to prepare them for the emotional roller coaster they are about to strap themselves into...... Good luck to new RNs of today 😂🕯
Specializes in Nursing Home, Dementia units, & Hospital.
You couldn't be more right if you tried. I've been doing the nursing thing for 20+ years and I don't want to do it anymore. All I ever really wanted to do was help. Now I feel like a legal drug pusher. ðŸ˜
LIFE in GENERAL is SCARY but not just anyone decides to give that up. if you, think Nursing is scary, WHY IN THE HELL, DID YOU GET INTO THIS TYPE OF FIELD, IN THE FIRST PLACE??? IF THE STOVE IS TO HOT, STOP COOKING, BEFORE YOU GET BURNT!!! I get so tired, on hearing, about how this, and that is so hard, GOD NEVER PROMISED ANYONE A ROSE GARDEN. MONEY doesn't grow on trees, and there's NO POT OF GOLD over the Rainbow. SUCK IT UP BUTTERCUP!!! STOP YOUR WHINING!!!, IT'S TOO HARD!!! You should get hurt at work, and live off of the system, OR IS THAT TO HARD TO DO, FOR YOU TOO??? GOD, GET A LIFE, AND GROW UP ALREADY...
LIFE in GENERAL is SCARY but not just anyone decides to give that up. if you, think Nursing is scary, WHY IN THE HELL, DID YOU GET INTO THIS TYPE OF FIELD, IN THE FIRST PLACE??? IF THE STOVE IS TO HOT, STOP COOKING, BEFORE YOU GET BURNT!!! I get so tired, on hearing, about how this, and that is so hard, GOD NEVER PROMISED ANYONE A ROSE GARDEN. MONEY doesn't grow on trees, and there's NO POT OF GOLD over the Rainbow. SUCK IT UP BUTTERCUP!!! STOP YOUR WHINING!!!, IT'S TOO HARD!!! You should get hurt at work, and live off of the system, OR IS THAT TO HARD TO DO, FOR YOU TOO??? GOD, GET A LIFE, AND GROW UP ALREADY...
Whoa now. That's quite the list of overwritten cliches stuffed into a paragraph of mostly nonsense. Don't strain yourself.
Nursing is less what I anticipated (hard physical and mental labor for substantial mental and monetary gain) and more "everything's your fault and nothing's your credit". Classes can't warn a student that the UM will crawl all over your a$$ about overtime you ended up occurring as you accompanied your vent put down to MRI because the resident wouldn't listen to your warnings about increased sedation and instead lectured you on oversedated the pt even though all they had was a Tylenol. Theoretically it shouldn't happen. Realistically a good chunk of my shift, cleaning up others messes both literally and figuratively. I still love nursing, it's the buttkissing and beauracracy I was surprised by and tired of.
I've been a nurse for 32 years mostly in CVICU/Open Heart and ED. The change from 8 hour shifts to 12 hours is one of the worst things that ever happened to nursing. Back in the day, you just did your job and went home after 8 hours. You had time to wind down and spend time with your family. Units had head nurses and charge nurses who did not take patients and did not need to. They handled the 50 million issues which now get dumped on the nurses. The nurses had time to take care of patients, which is what we are all here to do anyway. You charted on paper, not spending 30 minutes waiting for a computer to become available. And, and probably most importantly, there was a clear division of labor. You had nursing assistants to take care of patients, secretaries to take off orders, lab techs who actually drew blood not call the floors to "remind" the nurse to do them, physical therapists who did their jobs and didn't call the floor to tell the nurse to get the patient out of bed and that was their PT for the day. You took your lunch mostly on time and a bathroom break when you needed one. All that changed when the big corporations took over and the focus was taken off the patient and put on the almighty dollar.
Unfortunately that fear is justified. I've worked in LTC the last 10 years and seen a lot of change .... For worse. Just last week a co-worker, with 30+ years under his belt, was let go because a patient coded WHILE he was on his lunch break. He had followed all required protocol but it wasn't good enough. Everyone in the building was wrote up for unauthorized OT if we clocked out after 7 minutes after our shift. No matter whether our relief had arrived or not. We are overburdened with tasks from the admin and expected to perform miracles in 7.5 hrs. Because you HAVE to take a lunch break or they face penalties. This is the worst I've ever experienced and think it's about time to look into another career. I can't imagine another 10 years in this setting.
I really appreciate this article or post that you have shared. When I decided to be a nurse it was because something personal in my life had impacted me. I saw the wonderful way in which a nurse can be of service and help other people through a difficult time. I went into nursing with this idea that I would be able to provide this for my patients. However, I was met with a much different reality.
Being new to the field and adjusting to the environment was a difficult challenge that I was willing to meet. I found the job to be demanding, but my experiences in my life have shown me that if I remain willing to persevere that I typically succeed. But something occurred to me after about six months of being a nurse. I felt as though no matter how I tried I was unable to be the kind of nurse I wanted to be. Like many nurses I started in a long-term care facility working in a sub-acute rehab I held two jobs in this position. The last one I had was in a state facility that offered great benefits and pay. I never felt like I was able to do enough and I often felt like the work that I did had a little meaning whether it be because of working conditions, being short staffed, and being surrounded by nurses that have worked in this environment for a significant amount of time and no longer felt the passion behind the reasons they decided to become a nurse in the first place. I really struggled with this. I was very critical of myself and I found I was discrediting myself and all that I had accomplished as a nurse. I found my job to be demanding and often requiring me to stay late and my mental health and well-being seemed to be progressively affected.
I understand there will be difficulties and hardship with any nursing position or any job for that matter. As time went on I do not think I had that idealistic expectations anymore but I did think it was my job to provide excellent care and to make a difference. After a year at that last facility I decided I needed to get out of that kind of work if there was any hope that I could continue on as a nurse. Making this decision was difficult as I often thought about the benefits I had as the perks of the position. I thought eventually I could be a good enough nurse that I would be able to deal with all of the external pressures and internal ones too. I made a decision to switch to hospice nursing and as I said earlier, I had a personal experience that made me want to be a nurse directly in this field. I took a pay cut and a job with mildly average benefits, but in turn I finally feel as though I have the ability to be the nurse I've always wanted to be. I found supportive and loving nurses who want to help each other and do good together as a team. What a difference. I could never imagine doing any other job than this.
I feel as though I paid my new nurse dues in a very real way. Nursing isn't for everyone and there's certainly some kinds of nursing that are just not for me. I wish there was more staff, resources and time to provide the kind of care that most of us wished for when we decided to become a nurse. The reality of what it is really like is harsh and difficult to reason with. Nurses are very strong people and I commend anyone who wakes up every day and continues to persevere through their work.
Wolfhoundlady
2 Posts
I am retired after 44 years of nursing. I loved my career! Had some wonderful opportunities during my nursing career. Bedside nursing was not my choice. I was fortunated to do 14 years of insurance case management. Loved being able to guide a patient's care to be sure he got the proper care to RTW. Then I completed my career with 5 years of hospice nursing. What a privilege to be with a patient in their last day, to be able to know you were able to provide the care they needed, the meds to keep pain at a minimum, and works as part of a team to help the patient and family thru this very emotional time in their lives. Loved nursing and would choose it again!