Toney eventually started taking antidepressants, and she and her colleagues pleaded with upper management for mental health support, including help paying for therapy sessions. Nurses began leaving with every new wave of infection, and the unit struggled under a workload that at times tripled. ICU patients are the sickest in any hospital, but the covid patients who came in needed higher levels of care than the unit’s normal patient load. “I would go to work and see death all day,” she said.
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Toney has vivid memories of her hospital’s first major covid surge, in November 2020. But “the pandemic has really amplified the burdens on nurses to a level that’s just untenable,” Wathen said. Pre-pandemic, between 17 and 38 percent of nurses reported some depression, and female nurses - who dominate the profession - died by suicide at twice the rate of women who aren’t nurses. “Nurses have borne a collective, deep burden bearing witness to hundreds of thousands of deaths over the past two years … there’s an overwhelming exhaustion right now.” “Having to care for so many patients and not being able to provide the care that you know is needed leads to immense moral distress,” said AACN president Beth Wathen. Without systemic changes that address the forces driving the current shortfall, many hospitals simply won’t have the nursing workforce needed to provide good patient care. The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) recently found that 66 percent of acute and critical-care nurses have considered leaving the profession.Īnd there are signs that, in the wake of the pandemic, fewer new nurses are entering the profession - creating problems that could outlast the virus. More than one-third of nurses plan to leave their current role by the end of the year, according to a survey by Incredible Health, a nurse staffing company. But covid has turned a problem into a crisis. A wave of hospital consolidations in recent decades has helped hold down nurses’ pay and contributed to understaffing.
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The nurses who remain are left to care for more people with fewer resources, further fraying the fragile system and harming patients and healthcare providers alike.
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“I just can’t do it anymore,” said Toney (a pseudonym Grid is using to protect her privacy).Īcross the country, nurses are quitting bedside jobs at an alarming rate - worn out, mentally and physically, from dealing with surge after surge of desperately ill covid patients, fear for their own lives and frustration with people who renounce lifesaving covid vaccines or even deny the virus is dangerous. Now, two years into the pandemic, she’s considering something she never had before: leaving the ICU. It was rough, but she loved it: “That stress and adrenaline constant is something I used to thrive off of.” After more than eight years working in a big-city hospital intensive care unit, Michelle Toney has seen a lot - drug overdoses, trauma victims, patients violently lashing out.