Whether your patients are neonates, the elderly or somewhere in the middle, you want to give them the best care you can. While that often means gaining Continuing Education certifications, learning new skills or improving on the ones you have, it also means something much more basic. […]
Whether you like it or not, you spend a great deal of your life at work. In fact, it is estimated that the average person will spend over 13 years of her life at work. Because this is such a huge part of your life, you want to feel happy and fulfilled while on the job. No matter how much you love your career, the people with whom you work can quickly bring you down if they tend to be [...]
The health care profession is known for being a high-stress place in which doctors, nurses and other professionals are often put into uncomfortable situations. Disagreements between doctors and nurses are common, and nurses often struggle to create positive relationships with difficult patients. On very hard days, nurses may even find themselves at each other’s throats as their stress threatens to get out of hand. Creating healthy, connected relationships requires focus and determination. It will never happen by chance. These five [...]
Job satisfaction is at an all-time high this year according to The Conference Board, a non-profit research group. In 2019, 54 percent of surveyed workers said they were happy in their jobs, which was up from the 49 percent measured several years ago. These higher numbers today can generally be linked back to improved job security and better wages especially for younger workers. However, satisfaction with the job environment and with coworker interactions do not rate quite so high. While [...]
Because health care deals with both life overall as well as the quality of one’s life, ethical issues are sure to arise. Patients often struggle to know which treatment they should opt for and who they should tell about their health care crises. Even more difficult is the ethical dilemmas that health care providers face. The struggle to keep patient confidentiality high while still getting informed consent and advocating for a patient’s best interests is often great. While the laws [...]
Compassion fatigue is an emotional and a physical state experienced by those who have been caring for one or more individuals for a lengthy time. It certainly refers to a state of tiredness and exhaustion while also pointing to tense feelings and overall distress. Some may refer to it as burnout while others refer to it as a type of traumatic stress. While some people discount these feelings of compassion fatigue and their physical effects on the body, those who [...]
A rough day on the job may lead you to pull a pint of ice cream from the freezer in the evening. However, a string of rough weeks and months may be causing you to rethink why you even chose your health care career in the first place. After all, the long hours, stressful work environment and mounds of paperwork may be causing you to feel more exhausted than energized most days. If you are struggling through a tough patch [...]
Coping with the death of a patient is a topic that is very rarely discussed among health care professionals, yet it is an important one that affects your day-to-day stress levels and perception of success. Dealing poorly with death can lead to more perceived stress in your work and may lead to burnout over time. If you have never been taught what to do with your emotions when a patient dies, you may instead turn to negative habits to help [...]
Patients who are going through health crises are often filled with fear, which can leach out of them as anger. People who are usually calm and collected may suddenly be blowing up at the least provocation. As a nurse, you may be the person directly in an angry patient’s path. Although the majority of your patients will most likely be able to control their tempers, you may occasionally come across an angry, defensive, violent or otherwise difficult patient who will [...]
The term mindfulness has become a hot topic these days with many wanting to know how they can improve their daily lives as they pay more attention to themselves. It has been said that you cannot take care of others until you take care of yourself. Mindfulness allows you to do just that in your nursing career. Although you might think that mindful nursing would take up more of your day, it actually requires no extra time but allows you [...]
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