Skip to main content

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

Image
By

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.

 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Most Doctors Choose Employment

By
Increasingly, physicians today are employed and most of them willingly so.  The advantages of this employment model, which I will highlight below, appeal to the current and emerging generations of physicians and medical professionals.  In addition, the alternatives to direct employment are scarce, although they do exist.  Private practice gastroenterology practices in Cleveland, for example, are increasingly rare sightings.  Another practice model is gaining ground rapidly on the medical landscape.   Private equity (PE) firms have   been purchasing medical practices who are in need of capital and management oversight.   PE can provide services efficiently as they may be serving multiple practices and have economies of scale.   While these physicians technically have authority over all medical decisions, the PE partners can exert behavioral influences on physicians which can be ethically problematic. For example, if the PE folks reduce non-medical overhead, this may very directly affe
44 comments
Read more

Should Doctors Wear White Coats?

By
Many professions can be easily identified by their uniforms or state of dress. Consider how easy it is for us to identify a policeman, a judge, a baseball player, a housekeeper, a chef, or a soldier.  There must be a reason why so many professions require a uniform.  Presumably, it is to create team spirit among colleagues and to communicate a message to the clientele.  It certainly doesn’t enhance professional performance.  For instance, do we think if a judge ditches the robe and is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, that he or she cannot issue sage rulings?  If members of a baseball team showed up dressed in comfortable street clothes, would they commit more errors or achieve fewer hits?  The medical profession for most of its existence has had its own uniform.   Male doctors donned a shirt and tie and all doctors wore the iconic white coat.   The stated reason was that this created an aura of professionalism that inspired confidence in patients and their families.   Indeed, even today
36 comments
Read more

Electronic Medical Records vs Physicians: Not a Fair Fight!

By
Each work day, I enter the chamber of horrors also known as the electronic medical record (EMR).  I’ve endured several versions of this torture over the years, monstrosities that were designed more to appeal to the needs of billers and coders than physicians. Make sense? I will admit that my current EMR, called Epic, is more physician-friendly than prior competitors, but it remains a formidable adversary.  And it’s not a fair fight.  You might be a great chess player, but odds are that you will not vanquish a computer adversary armed with artificial intelligence. I have a competitive advantage over many other physician contestants in the battle of Man vs Machine.   I can type well and can do so while maintaining eye contact with the patient.   You must think I am a magician or a savant.   While this may be true, the birth of my advanced digital skills started decades ago.   (As an aside, digital competence is essential for gastroenterologists.) During college, I worked as a secretary
6 comments
Read more