They say cardiovascular disease is the “silent killer”, but did you know that many nurses post Covid are suffering from the silent killer of PTSD?
During the peak of Covid, frontline staff were plunged into a plethora of uncertainty. No one knew what Covid was, how it effected the body, what the disease process was, what type of isolation was appropriate, etc. Then came concerns over PPE supply, vaccination status, and most recently, questionable CDC guidance. Nurses lived in a constant fight or flight response as they obsessively watched O2 monitors and prayed for an uneventful shift. The Delta variant proved to be brutal and rampant as more patients were intubated at bedside and transferred to the ICU than many of us saw in our whole nursing careers combined. These patients were so sick and everyone was so critical that nursing had to prioritize patients who were originally healthy and able-bodied, full codes, in order to preserve respiratory equipment as much as possible.
Crisis protocols were in place and meant that we reused single-use PPE and placed a 6L nasal cannula plus a nonrebreather on a patient because we didn’t have enough high flow cannulas. Allow these things to continue for nearly 2 years and now dealing with the third Covid variant, means that nurses are tired and burnt out.
Many nurses are leaving to travel and make more money for the same job duties, some are leaving the bedside and stepping into less stressful job positions, and others are retiring or even just leaving the profession for good.
The struggle we face as a facility and as a nation is critical staffing shortages. Patients will never stop flooding the ER, but what happens when we have no healthcare professionals to properly care for all of these people? More money and incentives are only temporary. A long-term solution involves staff retention and recruitment coupled with staff engagement and empowerment.
Until next shift,
Shania
