Nurses need more support to prevent burnout in critical profession

Editor:

A nurse’s job description is assessing, observing, and speaking to patients. Nurses record and look at the details and symptoms of the patient’s medical history and current health. They help prepare patients for surgeries and exams, also give patients their medications and treatments, and then check on them regularly to look for side effects.

Nurses are essential to our healthcare system and play a major part in ensuring their patients get the best care possible, but it is a difficult profession to navigate and balance one’s own health.

Our current system forces nurses into difficult and unfair positions, where they are sadly positioned to fail. Most hospitals are understaffed, which causes nurses to be overworked and become burned out.

This burnout creates an environment with patient care is less than spectacular. The constant stress of assisting ill patients, and the inevitable strain of losing those you care for are daunting hurdles to overcome each day. Another issue is the lack of resources and support for nurses. Nurses sometimes don’t have access to the supplies and equipment they need and have a higher risk of getting sick because they are always around ill patients.

Nurses are also undervalued and not respected the way they should be. A way to help address these issues is to invest in nurses by providing them with the necessary resources, supplies and staffing to prevent burnout and ensure nurses can serve for long careers.

Our society needs to start advocating and supporting nurses more by showing up for them and fighting to make their workplaces better. Another way individuals can support this profession is by encouraging the younger generation to go into nursing to help to avoid nurses being overworked and show a new appreciation for what they do. Some ways to help this shortage are changing the educational model, and by making training programs more creative and flexible.

Another way to help nurses is prioritizing the workplace culture and ensuring their mental health is addressed to create longevity in the profession. Also, talk to your political representatives about the struggle of nurses and how we can help as a community to avoid these challenges and improve their workspace.

Emma Downey

Holley High School senior