If you have ever been admitted to a hospital, or taken someone to the hospital, chances are you already know the importance of the nursing profession. Nurses play a central role in promoting well being and educating people on healthcare.
Nursing is one of the most emotionally draining and stressful professions. Not everyone can deal with the pressures nurses have to go through every day to relieve pain and suffering of the people.
In a way, they also take care of our emotional well being. While performing their stressful duties, they may start to suffer from emotional exhaustion, lack of energy, and start to exhibit a cynical attitude toward their career or patients. This is known as burnout—a mental, physical, and emotional condition that typically affects nurses.
Tips for Combating Burnout Among Nurses
Studies show that stress of working long hours elevates risks of possible burnout among nurses, which affects their reaction time, produces a lack of coordination, and decreases motivation.
Every patient, regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion, gender identification, or sexual orientation, has the right to receive equal care. Disparities in dispensation of healthcare based on the above-mentioned distinctions gives rise to implicit bias.
Implicit bias, although intolerable anywhere, is a lot more common than one assumes, but when a healthcare professional shows signs of implicit bias, it can be a lot more damaging to the patient, their families, and overall standard of care. Implicitly-biased nurses can never offer equal standard of care. The challenges of Nursing and Implicit Bias can undermine the quality of healthcare.
Stressful work environment can cause both burnout and implicit bias. A physically and emotionally exhausted nurse is more likely to indulge in implicit bias. They may show less compassion toward certain patients. Thus, burnout among nurses leads to poor quality of care for patients.
In order to provide better healthcare, it is really important to alleviate the factors that contribute to burnout.
Let us now discuss tips that can be incorporated to combat burnout in nurses:
- Indulge in Self-Care
In order to alleviate burnout, nurses must practice self-care. Nurses going through burnout should prioritize their physical and emotional needs. If they are unable to care for themselves, how can they be expected to look after their patients.
Here are a few simple ways in which nurses can practice self-care:
- Exercise Regularly: Regular exercise can help nurses overcome emotional and impulsive reactions to things happening in their workplace.
- Use Emotional Regulation: Nurses must be in complete control of their thoughts and emotions when they are caring for their patients.
- Practice Mindfulness: Nurses can fight and prevent stress by practicing mindfulness—which is a great way to reduce stress, negative thoughts and building focus.
- Reducing Bias Through Communication: In order to eliminate implicit bias from their work environment, nurses must try to build rapport with their patients, learn about their backgrounds, cultures, and, as a nurse practitioner, try as much as they can to look beyond individual differences in providing for healthcare needs.
- Proper Sleep: No matter how busy their schedule, nurses should try to get at least 6-8 hours of sleep. A good, restful sleep will help you focus and calms the mind and body.
- Look for Support
Working in a high-stress work environment causes nurses to experience isolation and loneliness. Building a strong support network at work can help overcome this.
They can also use this support network to talk about their problems with fellow nurses and get help from them if the job gets too overwhelming.
Nurses can also seek help and support from their friends outside of the workplace. A friend can help them look after their kids, pick up groceries, and run other errands when they have to be at work. Making friends outside workplace will also help the nurses get a taste for a refreshing change of pace in their lives.
Nurses who develop chronic stress and depression should not hesitate in getting help from a professional mental health expert. A counselor would conduct private sessions to help them understand the causes of their stress and recommend stress-combating measures.
- Management Should Provide Support to Their Nurses
The management and nurse leaders can play a vital role in helping and supporting overwhelmed nurses. Following are some ways in which head nurses can help nurses combat stress and burnout:
- They should encourage a work culture wherein nurses can openly discuss their problems about the pressures of work.
- Nurse leaders must stay on the lookout for any signs of stress among the nursing staff working under them. They should provide counseling to those who feel especially overwhelmed and stressed out.
- If the healthcare facility is understaffed, the management must immediately hire new nurses to take away some of the burden on the current staff.
- The management and the leader nurses should also ask for the nursing staff’s opinions before taking any important decisions that could affect them.
- Take Time Off
Due to long work hours, nurses are vulnerable to developing chronic stress and depression. That is why taking breaks from work is important for nurses to provide body and mind time to recharge. Even taking short 30-minute breaks can help them reduce stress and make their work enjoyable.
- Maintain a Work-Life Balance
Due to long shifts and increased responsibilities at work, nurses often have poor work-life balance. As a result, they are unable to stick to a healthy routine, which makes them prone to health risks, complications in relationships, and mental exhaustion.
A good work-life balance keeps the burnout at bay. To maintain a healthy work-life balance, nurses must clearly set work and private life boundaries. Putting aside their work-related thoughts and emotions when leaving for home will help nurses give their complete attention and time to their family and friends.
- Learn to Say “No”
Nurses must learn to be compassionate towards themselves while staying committed to their nursing profession. In order to prevent burnout, they must learn to prioritize their commitments by learning to say “no” to new and unimportant offers.
A busy nurse should avoid taking more responsibility because it will only lead her to feel more stressed out.
Understaffed hospitals exploit their employees and make them work longer or in double shifts to handle the workload.
Overburdening employees with more work only leads to exhaustion and job dissatisfaction. In such cases, management should own their responsibility and get new hires so that the overburdened nurses can take up more tolerable levels of load.
The Bottom Line
Nursing is an emotionally stressful job. Often nurses burnout due to long work hours and increased workload that causes an emotional drain. Consequently, they suffer from cynicism, implicit bias, energy drain and emotional exhaustion. When feeling overwhelmed, nurses may not be able to take care of their patients effectively. In order prevent themselves from burning out, nurses must exercise self-care, practice mindfulness, seek support, maintain work-life balance, take regular breaks, and not take extra responsibilities that they can’t handle.