Jan 20, 2014. Last week I worked a 12-hour shift at the medical surgical unit. I was on my feet all night and ran (actually, speed-walked) from one room to another, non-stop, answering call bells, cleaning poop, feeding patients, lifting patients, dealing with upset family members, talking to doctors, educating patients, and re-assessing patients at least twice per shift.
I was exhausted, and about 30 minutes before shift change I realized that I had not seen the patient in room 230 at all during my shift! I had forgotten all of her meds, wound care, and blood work, so I panicked! I wondered to myself if she was she even alive. What was I going to do? Was I going to lose my job?
And then… I woke up. My heart was in my throat, and I was hyperventilating like I’d had just ran a marathon. Once I was able to settle down, I thanked the Almighty that it was just a dream. Does this sound familiar?
Work-Related Stress: The Stuff of Nightmares
Although I am retired, I still have those dreams. So imagine my surprise when I read an article published by Yahoo Business earlier last week which listed the 10 most stressful jobs for 2014, and nursing wasn’t one of them!
The list included some worthy jobs such as:
1. Enlisted military members (as a former enlisted member, I can agree)
2. Police officers
3. Firefighters
4. Airline pilots
5. Military generals
6. Taxi drivers
7. Event coordinators
8. Newspaper reporters
9. Public relations executives
10. Senior corporate executives
As I scratched my head in disbelief, I sought to find out the methodology used to justify why nursing wasn’t in the top ten most stressful jobs.
It turned out their methodology was based on the following:
Travel amounts
Income growth potential
Deadlines
Working in the public eye
Competitiveness
Physical demands
Environmental conditions
Hazards encountered
Own life at risk
Life of others at risk
Meeting the public
Are you telling me that the physical demands of a taxi driver are more stressful than that of nurses? Or that the senior corporate executives encounter more hazards at work than nurses do? Are we to assume that public relations executives have to deal with public demands that are harsher than those that nurses have to deal with in a daily basis, and that have cost some of them their lives?
Is an event coordinator more challenged by a “Bridezilla” than a nurse with six patients during the mid-morning med-pass? Are we to believe that missed deadlines by a newspaper reporter will cause more harm and stress than a missed blood pressure medication or a blood thinner?
I could go on and on, but the most important question that we must ask as a profession is: Have we become so irrelevant that no one wonders why nursing wasn’t on the list?
Making the Profession Relevant Again
In the last couple of years the nursing community has expressed outrage about the way that nurses have been portrayed on TV. These range from drunks to drug addicts, from aloof to unintelligent. But no one has questioned why is it that we have so little influence in the drafting of healthcare policies within our organizations, our community health, as well as at the state and local level.
We are the qualitative experts but few understand or value what we bring to the healthcare team. As long as we continue to sit idle and wait to be recognized as a community of hardworking experts, our personal efforts will continue to go unrecognized. Nursing burnout will increase exponentially and the nursing profession as a whole will be replaced for more cheaper, money-making alternatives.
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Posted By: Jen Fad
Monday, February 3rd 2014 at 5:56PM
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