Nursing job is a job where nurses provide hands-on job to the patients seeking care by administering medications, observing improvement or worsening of the disease, monitoring the intake and output, maintaining the records, building therapeutic relationships with the health care team members, providing emotional support to the patient and his family members, doing follow up care and much more. The experience that I’m going to share is not really about my job because I never got an opportunity to do job, but this is about the part of my life when I did internship in Lilavati Hospital, Mumbai, India. Being just an intern in the hospital, I faced plethora of worst experiences which is egregious.
To get involved in the profession, each day brought new challenges and new achievement. I always felt supernumerary in the hospital because you don’t count, you are just an extra in the hospital. Myriad of night shifts, terrible mentors, awful shifts, doing hard work and then you get no cash for the constant patient- oriented care you provided, is in my opinion erroneous. At times, instead of getting appraisal or just one better smile from the patients you get to hear abusive words and weird expressions. After becoming an intern nurse, I had to say no to family time most of the time.
Comparing to any other worst job experiences, much worst and hardest thing for a nurse is to see a patient die after you gave every possible care you could to let patient be alive. Sometimes, you just don’t get respect from the other health care professionals and you tolerate it because you just don’t have any other options. One day my nursing supervisor saw me joking around with the other staff nurse and she just got so upset with me that she felt like to take revenge on me and so she gave me mandatory overtime duty in emergency ward and that day I worked for 12 hours and I did not even got time for my lunch and dinner and since then I understood that joking in this field is a sin.
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I believe that nurses experience most workplace stress than any other profession because it really becomes difficult balancing home and work responsibilities. When the hospital is short on staff, I have seen nurses were the walking dead, and due to that nurses often gets burned out. Constant sheer anxiety of contracting a disease makes their mind disturbed. Even there is disturbance in the natural circadian rhythm due to the night shifts which might lead to illnesses. Due to workplace stress, nurses often become irritable and always gets annoyed to other and indirectly these all happens to worsen the relationship with others.
I have seen many nurses facing role confusion in the end and they lose the ability to decide what is right and what is wrong. At the end of the shift, nurse loses all the physical and mental ability and gets too tired with their same busy routine. All in all, I would like to conclude with a note that employers should provide numerous solutions to reduce the workplace stress by holding routine staff meetings, understanding the problems that are faced by the nurses, ensuring that adequate staff are available and also implementing in service education for the nurses.
References
- National Council of State Boards of Nursing – Explore Nursing
- National Institutes of Health – The Role of Nurses in Preparing the Future Nurse Workforce
- Journal of Nursing Management – Closing the Gender Gap in Nursing Leadership
- American Association of Colleges of Nursing
- Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario
- Allnurses – The Largest Online Nursing Community
