As nurses burn out, hospitals do whatever they can to keep them
One morning, in fall 2020, Francesca Camacho drove away from her 12-hour night shift as a critical care nurse at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and tried to merge onto the highway. The day’s work, in her words, was “just very terrible.” This wasn’t uncommon at the time: The Cook County area was experiencing the highest levels of COVID hospitalization it had ever experienced, surpassed only by the omicron variant wave the following year.
She was on the phone with her parents, a ritual she had developed as a way to decompress after a shift, when she noticed what appeared to be a teenage driver in front of her.
“I remember thinking, What is this girl doing that justifies her not letting me in?” Camacho, now 27, recalled. “And I just felt this surge of rage.”
She hung up the phone and screamed and cried for the rest of the drive home.
The next day, she asked her co-workers if anything similar had ever happened to them; they all said yes. Lunchtime therapy sessions with fellow nurses turned into professional therapy sessions.
“It really was feelings of anger that I felt, and I think
very deep underneath that was just terrible sadness about what I was seeing and what we were all going through,” she said recently.
In August, she quit her job. She is now a first-year law student at Boston University and plans to use her law degree to advocate changes in the medical field.
Burnout has always been a part of nursing, an effect of long working hours in physically and often emotionally taxing environments. The COVID pandemic exacerbated those factors and added some of its own: understaffing, a rise in violence and hostility toward health care workers over masking mandates and an increase in deaths, particularly
in the early months of the pandemic. In a study from the American Nurses Foundation, released in January, 57% of 12,581 surveyed nurses said they had felt “exhausted” over the past two weeks, and 43% said they felt “burned out.” Just 20% said they felt valued. (Those numbers were largely consistent throughout the pandemic.)
“Burnout and our current issues have been going on for decades,” said Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association. “So what did we learn from the last couple of years? That we need to make sure that we implement programs and processes to decrease the burnout and to improve the work environment. Because COVID is not the last pandemic, or the last major issue to happen.”
For some, those well-intentioned changes may not come soon enough: Forty-three percent of those surveyed by the American Nurses Foundation said they were at least thinking about switching jobs. Some, like Camacho, have left the profession. Others are shifting roles.
As experienced nurses leave the profession, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for students to get the hands-on, in-hospital training necessary for the profession, which in turn leads to nursing schools not producing enough graduates to fill the gap. Fix the burnout and staffing issues, Dr. Mensik Kennedy of the American Nurses Association said, and the infrastructure can once again support the necessary amount of new graduates needed to fill the nursing gap.
The most important way to start, she said, is to regularly measure nurses’ stress levels and to change the glorification of working without breaks. For Kelly Schmidt, a former NICU nurse, stress eased when she quit and became a school nurse.
“It’s still hard work,” she said. “But it’s not always life and death.”