You Could Help Your Staff Avoid Nursing Burnout
Becoming a nurse is incredibly rewarding and there are so many different options for employment. One-on-one settings where nurses visit their patients at home are just as necessary as ER nurses in a major hospital. One thing that all nurses have in common is that they’re all potentially susceptible to something called burnout.
What Is Nursing Burnout?
Nursing burnout involves nurses becoming emotionally, mentally, and physically worn out by their daily job duties. For most people, a bad day is something that passes. When a nurse is nearing burnout, though, a bad day feels like it happens every day and it just never ends. Nurses who are becoming burned out might find that they can’t be nurses anymore, especially if their mental and physical health are damaged too badly.
Understanding What Burnout Looks Like
Burnout looks different in every single person affected by it. This happens because the individual person is responding to the specific stressors that they have encountered. That said, burnout does follow some patterns. Nurses who are approaching burnout might find themselves irritable, exhausted, and just generally feeling as if they need to be doing something else. They might be sick more often, too.
Balancing Work and Life
For the most part, people are responsible for their own work and life balance. That means that a nurse who suspects burnout needs to be managing that individually. There are lots of factors that might make that more difficult, though, like having more than one family member who has special needs, whether that’s permanent or temporary.
What Can You Do?
As someone who manages nursing staff, there’s plenty that you can do to help reduce burnout rates. The Spring 2018 Nurse Survey conducted by the American Nurses Foundation gathered a great deal of information from nurses about nursing. Among the reasons cited for leaving nursing, respondents included retiring and long hours as the two largest responses beyond “other.” Supplemental medical staffing can help to resolve the staffing issues that result from experienced nursing staff leaving, regardless of their reasons. It can also help to shorten working hours. Encouraging staff to take time away is another way to support nurses in their own efforts at reducing and managing stress levels.
No matter what type of facility you’re managing, there are staffing requirements you need to meet. Your patients and their families expect a certain level of care and support, so your job is to ensure that your staff is able to meet those expectations. With help from supplemental staffing services, you can do just that.
