An Untenable Situation
Nurses and healthcare workers were treated to a hero’s parade during the early days of COVID-19, revered for putting their lives on the line while the rest of the world was in lockdown. It was a short-lived display of appreciation. As the pandemic dragged on, the parade became a nightmare for many.
Healthcare workers, especially nurses, faced an uptick in hostility and even violence as masks and other pandemic-related health mandates turned into a flash point. As they watched thousands of their colleagues pay the ultimate price for their sacrifice, nurses suddenly found themselves caught between angry patients and burnout that had been building well before COVID-19.
Understaffed nursing units have long taxed healthcare facilities around the globe, a problem that was already accelerating in late 2019. The pandemic only made matters worse.
This was just the tip of the iceberg, from extraordinarily long shifts and frequent changes in shifts to being on their feet for many hours at a time and sleeplessness. On top of this, the workplace is an especially high-pressure one for nurses, coupled with high levels of patient-related emotional stress.
It comes as no surprise that burnout has always existed in the nursing field. Equally unsurprising is the fact that the most significant cause of nurse burnout is stress. But, the pandemic has pushed nurses to a tipping point and many have had enough. A recent study by the American Nurses Foundation found that 57 percent of nurses had felt some level of exhaustion in the last two weeks, and 45 percent felt burned out. Only 20 percent of those nurses felt valued, and 43 percent were thinking about changing jobs or leaving the nursing profession altogether.
We rely on our healthcare workers, and as many Americans are aging and increasingly reliant on them, the magnitude of the nursing crisis in America can’t be overstated.
Patient Care Hangs in the Balance
Without nurses, the quality of healthcare across the nation would surely take a beating. They are the quarterbacks of our clinical settings, influencing patient outcomes as powerful physician liaisons. And many of them are at their wit’s end.
Another study lays out the future in the starkest of terms. Since the pandemic, about 100,000 nurses have left the workforce in the U.S., and another 600,000 plan to do the same by 2027.
Among the most concerning effects of this situation is on nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. Fewer nurses are responsible for more patients, meaning a meaningfully lower quality of care. It really is a matter of life and death. When nurses have too many patients to care for, medication errors rise, and morbidity and mortality rates go up. If left to continue floundering, this crisis will inevitably make it more difficult for patients to get care when they need it, and it will cause healthcare costs to spike even more.
Certainly, appropriate staffing can start to reverse all of these trends, reducing mortality and the length of patient stays overall, but that alone won’t solve every factor bringing our healthcare workers to their knees.
Unraveling the Mess, STAT
Complicating matters even more is that there is no one silver bullet that would just make all of this go away.
Yes, more training must be available, especially in clinical settings. Healthcare organizations can work with educational institutions to provide more education opportunities. There needs to be better recruiting, and nurse pay needs to improve. There needs to be better representation in underrepresented communities. This list could go on and on…
But none of this is going to change overnight or even in the next few years. Unraveling the mess before us is complicated by an enormously complex healthcare system in the United States, and it will likely take years to overcome its challenges. What’s needed now is better communication and awareness, and it’s up to healthcare companies to implement these solutions for their beleaguered heroes.
Providing the right tools and training nurses, and all healthcare workers for that matter, to have a stronger awareness of their stress is all that it takes to relieve some of the burden while the system works toward long-term solutions. Communication has always been at the root of starting to turn serious problems into serious solutions.
There Is a Way Forward
Nurses are subjected to about as fast-moving of a working environment as one can imagine. It’s a situation that leaves little time for reflection. The hurried pace often makes it difficult even to recall key events throughout the shift. Our stress triggers are never easy to nail down, even less so for healthcare workers. That’s why providing tools that help to achieve this awareness while training our healthcare workforce to be better stewards of their own well-being in the future is absolutely essential now.
There is a way forward that can help today.
They’ve been around for over a decade, giving folks useful insights into their physical health, such as the Fitbit and Apple Watch. These have shown themselves to be helpful in monitoring heart rate, sleep patterns, and overall activity. It’s well known that much of our emotional well-being can be reflected in our physical health. Stress can cause your heart to race, you may sweat more, you may feel nauseous, and even feverish. Wearable devices, however, have been largely untapped as a way to gain stronger awareness of our stressors.
More and more companies are now making this connection, and we help them do that with the Pulse app. It also helps alleviate the complicated process of training nurses. Because they’re so vital, having nurses offline for hours or even days for training is nearly impossible. Pulse is a model for overcoming such an issue, giving nurses the bite-sized learning they need to get to the punchline fast!
This is changing the game of well-being in the workplace! Data collected by wearables can sync up with calendars and GPS, offering surgical ability to dissect triggers, allowing the user to match biological indicators of stress to a precise moment and place, in this case allowing nurses to zero in on what’s making them feel so burned out.
This awareness and perspective on what actually triggered an emotional response allows nurses and healthcare workers to recall stress triggers easily. They’re able to manage their stress in a stronger way because knowledge is power. The more awareness builds, the better-prepared nurses are to tackle the day. Going into a high-stress situation with this knowledge is the key to unraveling this crisis now.
Giving nurses the tools and awareness they need isn’t just good for their own wellbeing, it can improve patient outcomes too and that’s good for all of us!
