If you ask me how it feels like to be a Registered Nurse at the emergency department for these four and a half years, here you go:
Think of a place where phones are going off, you hear voices all around and every room is stuffed with people. Once you're done with reading this particular paragraph, close your eyes and imagine that when you turn around, you are seeing all the hallways are full of patients, mostly on stretchers. Can you see those 15 people on the board signing in? Oh! The moment you will be ready to get one of your ICU patients upstairs, there will be another one waiting for you.
Moreover, there's no chance that I get time to eat or drink. Barely, I get a chance to go to the restroom- during my 12-hour shift. Am I the only one?
When I asked the fellow registered nurses working at the emergency departments (I am a part of various communities with internet-based websites), I came to know that I am not the only one who's going through this - post-traumatic stress disorder - as they name it. Yes, it sounds like quite a heavy word, for that matter.
Digging around the web (I was curious), I found a study which says that in the year 2007, there were 24% of ICU nurses and more or less 14 percent general nurses who were diagnosed positive for the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Immediately, the first thought that came to my mind after reading this fact was, "Big deal! Even the quote goes like - 'Nursing - the hardest job you'll ever love.' Ah, yes. Nursing." Don't get this wrong in anyway. I am certainly in love with being a nurse. But it is now more than ever evident that nursing has long been considered as one of the most stressful professions (no wonder!).
Do you know why? Whenever researched, and I felt it myself too that if it's the stress, it has to come down to the organizational problems in the hospitals across the globe. In addition, the reasons may include the cuts in the staffing - low staffing and low wages, that's what nurses are mostly stuck with.
My personal experience, however, screams aloud that hiring more nurses won't really fix things back to normal. There has to be another solution. It may also include reconstructing the hospitals, for this way (I am sure), the administrators will pay more attention to what nurses have to say about the workflow and the patient care. I know no nurse (thankfully!) who'll not concord with a training program, which aims to help him/her to relieve stress and deal with the ethical dilemmas that occur every now and then.
If you ask me, what it's like to be a nurse - often at times I am stretched to the limit. I've seen a clinical nurse when driving, vomiting on the way to work - all because of the unimaginable level of stress.
My friend once asked me, "Isn't there any place where you can go, sit and just be alone, in a quiet room, for a couple of minutes?" To which, all I could reply is, "I could have a patient on the death bed, or I could have a patient die and I get no break. Can you beat that?"
And when that's not enough, in case there is any addition of new forms of documentation, and even addition of the electronic health records, the extra work is assigned to a nurse. No person other than a nurse can understand how the workload gets larger than ever when such things happen. It should not be this way, certainly.
As compared to the general population, I find myself much more prone to have stress, anxiety and depression, and many fellow registered nurses feel the same too.
All I can see and I am worried about is that in this time and era, hospitals think of a nurse as a cost to be cut. Shouldn't it be considered as a revenue stream on the other hand? Who set the mindset that a nurse is an easily replaceable resource?
The administrators will keep on complaining about nurse's burnout, but they won't ever link it to the moral distress that nurses go through. I've seen a good number of cases where a nurse knows what exactly they are meant to do, but hardly are able to act on it, thereby turning the clinical situation critical.
The solution could be a series of in-person workshops where a nurse is trained to deal with moral distress and the ones that involve simulations to practice how to make ethical interests heard at the workplace.
It's high time for the administration to set a goal to help the nurses communicate in a better way with the team members and the staff members as a whole. It's high time they think of a nurse not as a cost to be cut but as a scarce resource that calls for to be invested in, respected and supported. It's time to wipe out the deafening sounds of stress.
