By Ana Veciana-Suarez, April 28, 2020, Miami Herald.
Each has a compelling story about what inspired them to become a nurse. Now each of them has a gripping worry about contracting COVID-19.
As these frontline healthcare workers mark another Nurses Week in May, it’s never been more stressful to help sick people get healthy — yet that hasn’t stopped nurses from going to work.
“Typically,” says Barbara Bruce, a 42-year RN veteran who works for Memorial Healthcare System in Broward, “you don’t go into this profession unless you want to help people, and that’s what we’re doing right now, even more so.”
Nonetheless she acknowledges reality: “Every time I get close to someone coming in, I think, ‘do they have it?’ ”
Bruce, a director of nursing in charge of regulatory oversight for MHS, was supervising nurses at the C.B. Smith Park coronavirus testing site in Southwest Broward when she was interviewed for this story. Her hours have been long, she says, the stress debilitating.
A 2018 survey by RNnetwork, a travel nurse staffing agency, found that 62 percent of respondents reported feeling regularly burned out at work, and 54 percent said a heavy workload has negatively affected their mental health. Forty-nine percent have considered leaving nursing in the last two years.
Other studies underscore those findings. One found that up to 33 percent of new nurses leave the workforce within the first two years, and the 10-year RN Work Project study found 17 percent of newly minted RNs quit their first nursing job within the first year, 33 percent leave within two years, and 60 percent leave within eight years.
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