Burnout in the Nursing Profession - Is it Time to Unionize?

While medical careers at all levels are suffering from burnout, this post will focus on nurses, particularly those who work in hospitals.  Ask any of these nurses about the burnout phenomenon and make sure you have an hour or two available to hear a sober soliloquy on the subject. What brought this plague upon them?  Is there an antidote?

For nearly my entire career, I rounded daily at local hospitals attending to my patients.  I worked very closely with hospital nursing staff for nearly 3 decades.  They are selfless professionals who give their patients and their colleagues all they have.  Indeed, the public tends to trust them more than they do doctors, and I understand why.  Nurses always have their patients’ backs, but who has theirs?  Are they overworked?  Yes.  Are they underpaid?  Yes.  Do they feel appreciated by their employers?  Take a guess.  The Covid-19 pandemic has introduced a new crisis in hospital nursing as many have left the profession or have sought easier and more lucrative opportunities such as travel nursing positions.  So, chronically overworked hospital nurses must now contend with a worsening staffing shortage with no solution in sight. Sound good for staff morale?  Sound good for patient care?

Over my career, I have felt so strongly that the nursing profession needs robust advocacy that I have supported nurses forming or joining unions, even though I am not an unreserved supporter of organized labor.  In general, I believe that non-union workers can receive a fair shake from employers, but this is not always the case.  Sometimes union membership is the best pathway to a fair wage and working conditions.

           How would Florence Nightingale feel about today's nursing profession?

I think that the onset of hospital nursing burnout began when electronic medical records (EMR) entered the medical landscape.  This had a dramatic and deleterious effect on nurse-patient relationships.  Hospital nurses no longer had the time to linger at the bedside establishing trust and rapport over multiple patient visits throughout the day.  EMR was a poison pill that attacked hands-on nursing care.  I witnessed it daily.  Nurses would clog up the hallways pushing their laptops on wheels as they would input endless patient data.  [Was all this data truly necessary for patient care?  How much of it was ever actually read?] Yes, if a patient was in a crisis, then nurses would rush in to assist.  But there wasn’t time anymore for the routine face to face interactions with patients which was so critical for patient care. Many nurses expressed to me that it seemed that their main mission was data entry and pill distribution, not exactly what they signed up for.

Along with EMR, nurses cared for increasingly sicker patients and carried higher patient loads than they felt they could safely manage. 

Do you think the reality I describe above will attract students and others to the nursing profession?

Stay tuned.  I'll have other posts on medical burnout over the next few months.