bbear2102

I recently finished watching the Apple TV show "The Me You Don't See" about mental health issues throughout the world. It really moved me and inspired me to think about what we can do for the nursing community. We are now over a year into a pandemic that has affected everyone on the planet. Nurses continue to battle as cases in the US are back on the rise despite an effective vaccine that is widely available. I've seen nurses giving interviews about how frustrating it is to see the overwhelming suffering every time we are at work and yet people still don't believe that it is real. How do we keep fighting when some people don't believe that the enemy exists? Keep Fighting Don't get me wrong, there were problems in healthcare before COVID, however this pandemic has hastened the burnout among many nurses. I thought maybe COVID could just burn the healthcare systems to the ground and we could start over, but that didn't happen. The healthcare systems are coming out on top, and the staff is suffering. We suffered short on staff, short on supplies, short on legitimate appreciation from the systems that we work for and to top it all off, half of the country doesn't believe what we are seeing every day. I don’t think that nursing itself is toxic; I think that the environments that we work in are. It wasn’t always like this. Hospitals are run like businesses, not places of healing. The bottom line is all that matters, not how patients are actually cared for. The people at the top are so out of touch with what is happening at the bedside as nurses are just trying to provide the best care they can with what little time they have. Too much emphasis has been put on making it look like we provided good care without actually giving us time to provide good care. This is not what we became nurses to do. We Must Speak Up How do we finally speak up and demand that our voices are heard and that we are valued? How do we put our mental health first and our well-being first without being made to feel as though we are not "team players"? How do we change this cooperate machine that has taken over hospital systems? Healthcare systems would rather tolerate the high cost of nurse turnover rather that fix the problem of nurse burnout. We are not martyrs; we are human beings who are caring for other human beings. If we do not take care of ourselves nobody will. Change must happen before things get worse. We need to be the change that we want to see. We need to make it happen for the future of nursing, for us, and for our patients. It starts with us no longer accepting the unhealthy work environments and finding better places to work. It starts with us no longer feeling guilty about prioritizing ourselves and our families. We need to demand better or find it elsewhere. We Need to Begin Somewhere ... I honestly don’t know how to begin but we need to begin somewhere. I think it will only get worse before it gets better if we don’t start standing up to the powers that be. I know we hesitate to say no to picking up shifts because we know they will be short without you, or staying late to help out, or staying at that toxic job because if you leave it will make it even worse for those that stay. They expect us to do that at this point. What if we all started saying no and prioritizing ourselves and safe boundaries? What if we made them start dealing with the problem of staff retention and nurse burnout? Imagine the possibilities of actually being able to work with safe staffing, having the equipment you needed to do your job and to actually really be able to provide the care that you know is needed? It used to be like that and it can be like that again if we all work together.

I completely agree. It's not necessarily the virus itself that gives me the most anxiety, although I worry every day about bringing it home, but the stress and all the issues that come with being severely understaffed for this. The people that won't wear masks and think this is fake are putting us in a lose/lose situation. We go from taking care of 2 ICU patients to taking care of 3-4. That is what I really have the most anxiety about-that I will be unable to provide the best care possible due to the situation I am put in.

As luck, fate, destiny, whatever you want to call it, would have it I am back at the bedside as an ICU nurse in the middle of a Pandemic. I have been away from the bedside in various roles for the last 5 years, and now I am back. I live in the Dallas area and right now we are exploding with cases. As nurses, we saw this spike coming from a mile away. As ICU nurses we often notice that our patient is deteriorating before there is any noticeable change in vital signs-we just have that "feeling" that this is not going to go well. I feel that with our current situation here in Texas, however I feel that there is nothing I can do, no bolus to give, no oxygen to provide. I feel like nurses, healthcare professionals and scientists are shouting from the rooftops that our house is on fire. While some see the flames, others ask questions such as are you sure it's fire? Is it just really hot in your house? Did you leave the lights on? Did you set it on fire yourself?? As ICU nurses we are possibly the last stop between your journey on earth and the afterlife. We do everything in our power to keep you here. Why would some people think that people in our position would exaggerate such a dire situation? This is what I cannot wrap my head around. We see firsthand the devastation this is causing, yet all we can do is shout louder only for it to fall on deaf ears. I drive by restaurants and parking lots that are full of cars on my way to care for patients in a full ICU as well as a full COVID unit. Our COVID unit is full so now COVID positive patients are in the general ICU as well. Do we have the staff for this? The answer is no, most hospitals don't. I still read comments on posts about the increased census in hospitals that have every "ya but" response you can think of. Ya, but they are just full because elective surgeries started back again, ya, but the testing numbers are fake, ya, but I have a friend that says this isn't true, ya, but it's all a hoax. Come to work with any nurse just for one day and call it a hoax to our faces. Now let's talk about PPE. In my hospital, we much like our colleagues in NY, we must wear our N95 masks 5 days before we can get a new one. We are how many months into this and we can't have new masks each day? It is really hard to find germicidal wipes and we even ran out of hand sanitizer about a month and a half ago for a couple of weeks. How is this still happening in our country? Even as cases surge in Texas not every patient is being tested on admission. This is not just in our hospital. We find patients that are positive after they have been in the hospital and staff have been exposed for several days in some cases. All this to say: after 4 months have we learned nothing??