The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Nurses and stress
Ideas for tackling the mental game
At Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, nurses who need to de-stress can escape to a quiet, calming space in their unit known as a “tranquility room.”
When a stressful event takes place in the hospital, they can attend debriefing sessions with teams of physicians and chaplains, says Dr. Jacqueline Herd, Grady’s executive vice president and chief of nursing.
“We also encourage staff to talk to their leaders and peers,” she said.
For at least a decade, nurses have consistently reported the highest levels of job stress in all the health-care professions.
It’s such a worry that most of Georgia’s nursing schools are talking about job stress in more than one class and at every level of learning.
Sharon Grason, a veteran trauma and surgery nurse and director of nursing at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, says that’s the way it should be.
“The strains on nurses have become greater and greater,” Grason said.
She compares the role of the nurse at the patient’s bedside to that of the orchestra conductor.
In the past, a hospital patient would see the doctor, nurse and possibly a respiratory therapist and physical therapist, Grason said.
Today, those same people will be at the patient’s bedside. But the parade of people coming in the room also may include a hospitalist, case manager, nutritionist, social worker and pharmacist.
“We [the nurses] are orchestrating all these different disciplines around the care of one patient,” Grason said.
“The nurse is the constant” and the one who has to make sure the patient’s wants are being met, the family is being informed and the proper care is being administered, she said.
At Georgia Gwinnett, “stress and coping adaption is one of our main concepts that we teach,” Grason said. “We have multiple classes that cover that as far as us being the advocate, the leader, the evidence-based integrator.”
At Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, the topic of on-the-job stress is dealt with across the nursing curriculum, but specifically in the course on leadership, said Sharon Radzyminski, chair of the university’s nursing school.
Nurses, she said, operate under varying levels of stress.
“A lot of it depends on the nurses’ degree of preparation and the working environment where they are employed,” Radzyminksi said.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Georgia had about 69,000 employed registered nurses in 2015, earning an average of $69,000 a year. Advanced practice registered nurses, nurse anesthetists and nurse midwives were not part of that headcount.
Today, some organizations estimate that Georgia has 90,000 to 100,000 working RNs.
Traci T. Sims, a registered nurse and clinical assistant professor at Georgia State University’s Byrdine
F. Lewis School of Nursing and Health Professions, said stress “is certainly something we’re talking more about.”
She teaches juniors who are in their second semester of the nursing program.
”And the very first chapter I cover in my course is on stress,” Sims said. “Self-awareness is where we begin.”
Jeannie Edwards of Cumming said she found nursing very stressful.
“There’s always so much to do, and I never felt like I completed everything I wanted to do by the end of the shift,” she said. “Sometimes, I’d leave work with a heavy heart because I felt there was so much more I wanted to do.”
She worked as an RN in hospitals for the first part of her career and pushed through the tough days with a soak in the tub, a few tears and the help of a supportive husband and family.
“That allowed me to fill my cup back up,” said Edwards, who retired in May after 25 years as head of the school health services program in Dawson County.