Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
At somewhere in my mid-20s, I wonder how I am going to survive another 40 years working as a nurse in A&E. Am I on the road to burnout and destruction?
During my training, I had a brief lecture on burnout and ways to deal with stress so as to prevent the onset of emotional and physical exhaustion. One of the suggestions made by the Royal College of Nursing is to discuss how I am feeling with supportive friends and family. Imagine this – I come home and my boyfriend asks: “How was your day at work?” If I were to reply honestly, my answer would be something along the lines of: “Well, my first task of the day before I had time to eat breakfast was to respond to a cardiac arrest, performing chest compressions on an overweight patient; I broke out in a sweat that rendered my shower half an hour earlier useless. While this was going on, another patient was thrashing about on their trolley, confused, ripping off their monitoring, lashing out because they were recovering from a seizure. The 89-year-old lady next door needed the commode every five minutes because her dementia was causing her to forget that she’d just been on it. As I didn’t want to upset her further, I assisted her repeatedly.
http://www.theguardian.com/healthca...s-frontline/2015/jan/14/a-and-e-nurse-burnout
During my training, I had a brief lecture on burnout and ways to deal with stress so as to prevent the onset of emotional and physical exhaustion. One of the suggestions made by the Royal College of Nursing is to discuss how I am feeling with supportive friends and family. Imagine this – I come home and my boyfriend asks: “How was your day at work?” If I were to reply honestly, my answer would be something along the lines of: “Well, my first task of the day before I had time to eat breakfast was to respond to a cardiac arrest, performing chest compressions on an overweight patient; I broke out in a sweat that rendered my shower half an hour earlier useless. While this was going on, another patient was thrashing about on their trolley, confused, ripping off their monitoring, lashing out because they were recovering from a seizure. The 89-year-old lady next door needed the commode every five minutes because her dementia was causing her to forget that she’d just been on it. As I didn’t want to upset her further, I assisted her repeatedly.
http://www.theguardian.com/healthca...s-frontline/2015/jan/14/a-and-e-nurse-burnout