Nursing on Empty
ROOTS OF RESILIENCY BCNU steward and South Fraser Valley region member Karen Evjen holds a tree that she says symbolizes the strength and resiliency nurses need to brace themselves from the storm that is stressful working environments.
The nursing profession is highly demanding with many physical and psychological hazards, and nurses are routinely exposed to trauma, violence and human suffering on a daily basis.
To help address this reality, BCNU is hosting another series of its popular personal resilience workshop across the province this year. The day-long events are designed to teach nurses how to counter the side-effects of delivering care in stressful and
traumatic situations.
"Personal resilience" refers to the ability to recover balance and regain a sense of well-being after exposure to the volatile situations encountered in health care. A key tool in managing stress is the ability to recognize its impacts and take corrective action before it turns into burnout and compassion fatigue.
"The workshop helps us recognize trauma effects when they show up in our lives," says BCNU steward and South Fraser Valley region member Karen Evjen, who took it in February. "Trauma at work can lead to abuses in other areas of life, like reliance on methods of detachment like alcohol, drugs, sex or shopping."
"You tell yourself you can do this, and you forget that you are running on empty."
Led by seasoned trauma specialist Dr. Jeff Morley and psychologist Carolyn Burns, the workshops offer help in detecting the signs of excessive stress and offer tips on how to better care for oneself while working in an institution where self-care is not a priority.
"We need to cultivate our ability to recognize when we should be putting more time into caring for ourselves," says Evjen. "Nurses are trained to put their patients first, but they also need to understand when and how to give priority to their own needs too."
BCNU continues to press policy makers and health employers to embark on a complete reform of health-care workplaces to make them more psychologically supportive and healthier for nurses. In the meantime the workshops remind individual nurses how important it is to balance the demands of work with life outside the workplace.
"As care givers, we share so much of ourselves with our patients and families," says home health nurse Mindi Sekhon. "You tell yourself you can do this, and you forget that you are running on empty."
The BCNU South Fraser Valley region steward says her workshop was a wake-up call. "Since attending it, I have diligently been practising self-care techniques like staying in bed longer or going for a massage, and it feels really good."
Occupational experts say achieving a reasonable work/life balance plays a critical role in maintaining overall psychological health, which in turn is crucial to sustaining a nurse's capacity for empathy. Long shifts, understaffing and the moral distress that comes with over-capacity operations make it difficult to put personal needs first, so it is vital to encourage nurses to engage in greater self-care.
"If I'm not taking care of me, then no one is."
"This workshop gets you thinking about the fact that if I'm not taking care of me, then no one is," says Evjen. "Nurses need to act on the psychology of their situation before it comes back to bite them."
Workload and burnout have become critical issues for nurses today, negatively affecting recruitment and retention throughout health care. If feelings of burnout are left unaddressed, they can increase the likelihood that nurses will choose to leave their current position or even leave the profession entirely.
A 2015 UBC School of Nursing survey of over 2,000 BCNU members found that 45 percent of respondents reported high levels of emotional exhaustion, while 40 percent indicated they intended to leave their current job within a year. Over 50 percent of respondents wanting to leave their jobs cited burnout as the main reason for their dissatisfaction.
UPDATE (March - April 2018)