Your Next Shift: A Nursing Career Podcast

Nurses, are you ready to hear podcaster to podcaster? That’s right- this next guest not only shared her nursing experiences with us, but taught us a thing or two about podcasting itself! Now, don’t be scared. Even if you don’t want to start up a nursing podcast, you can definitely take away several practical strategies by tuning in to this episode.

Marie MacMillan is a critical care nurse and hosts a healthcare themed podcast entitled Head-to-Toe—Stories from the history and future of healthcare. This year she is recording extraordinary stories, conversations on brilliant careers, and trending topics in the field of medicine.

A few take aways from our interview with Marie MacMillan include:

• How networking can be one of the best professional habits;
• What thanking yourself after work can do for your job satisfaction;
• And why every nurse has an important story to tell!

Nurses, is it time for you to make a career shift? Are you tired of the typical hospital-based nursing? This next guest reminds us to pick our heads up and notice the whole spectrum of nursing that is available to our nursing career growth.

Lyn Lais, RN has more than 26 years of health care experience and prides herself on delivering a different experience. Her expertise in short-term rehabilitation and her broad system perspective helps Lyn deliver care that is agnostic to setting while fostering positive transitions, avoiding readmissions and helping people live sparked lives.

A few take aways from our interview with Lyn Lais, RN include:

• How investing in a good pair of shoes can make a world of difference;
• What self-confidence can do for your nursing career;
• And why paying equal attention to both personal and professional life will support you as a nurse!

Who’s ready to embrace conflict? That’s right- you heard me correctly. You know the difficult conversations that nobody wants to have. This next guest, through some courageous actions of his own, has learned to not only manage conflict... he looks forward to it!

Randy Keirn, MPA, BSN, RN is an international leadership trainer and coach with over 20 years of experience. He has developed and delivered high quality interactive training that produces results in the areas of Effective Communications, Conflict Management, Leadership Development and Cultural Transformation with corporations, non-profits, government, and educational organizations.

A few take aways from our interview with Randy Keirn, MPA, BSN, RN include:

• How getting promoted and being ready for leadership are two different things;
• What facing a fear of public speaking can do for your nursing role;
• And why he almost walked out on a large corporate client!

While there is a lot of evidence related to physician burnout (e.g. the prevalence, rates, and consequences of), this is not the case in the nursing literature. Not that there are no articles related to nursing burnout. Trust me, there are many. But the issue relates more to the fact that the science does not tell us one story.

In fact, the numbers are all over the place!

Don’t believe me? Head over to PubMed or your favorite scholarly search engine and type in the term “nurse burnout prevalence” and see what you find. In one of my recent keynote talks, here are the studies I have on my prevalence slide:

• Oncology Nurses 21.5 % (Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, 2010)
• Nurses in England 42% (BMC Nursing, 2011)
• ICU Nurses in Portugal 31% (BMC Anesthesiology, 2013)
• NICU Nurses 25.9% (BMJ Quality & Safety, 2014)
• Nurses in Mainland China 34.9% (Nursing & Health Sciences, 2015)
• Emergency Nurses 26% (International Journal of Nursing Studies, 2015)
• Nursing Homes in France 40% (Journal of Clinical Nursing, 2017)

And then there is this recent systematic review on the prevalence of burnout which outlines that burnout does exist in various roles of healthcare professionals. But again, this is just one subset (palliative care). So yes. Nurse burnout statistics are all over the place, however maybe one thing that the literature can agree upon is that it does exist.

The nursing studies that are published related to nurse burnout have limitations such as low sample sizes and weak study designs. If we do not have the literature to support nurse burnout, then we will not get the support from decision makers in power.

Poor studies- do data. Without the outcome measures, there are little interventions that can be put into place. Healthcare decision makers need to see the data. They are all about the numbers. Whether we like it or not, healthcare has become likened to a business. Without money, new interventions that can help alleviate nurse burnout, will not be adopted.

I do think that we can agree that nurse burnout does exist. Again, if you go to your favorite search engine and type in the term, you will receive lots of articles related to the topic of burnout in nursing.

What I also think is that we do not need any more of these smaller, specialty specific studies. The ones where the team uses the Maslach Burnout Inventory to measure burnout in nurses pre- and post- some intervention. We get it. Nurses are burned out. In all jobs, all locations, and all over the world!

While I cannot start to give advice or suggestions related to specific study design (that is not the point of this blog or the Nursing from WithinTM work), I do want to put a charge out there to anyone reading who is involved in world of scholarly work to look at nursing burnout.

We need robust evidence that nurse burnout is linked to patient safety and outcomes. Yes, process measures such as these are harder to measure and difficult to link in a one-to-one causation. For example, it is difficult to say that nurse burnout and burnout alone is what causes patients to fall (as an example), however we need study designs that do their best to look at burnout and the impact it has on patient safety and quality.

Nurse and researcher, Linda Aiken, PhD, FAAN, FRCN, RN, has published extensively on nurse and patient outcomes related to job dissatisfaction and burnout. In fact, in a 2012 article in the American Journal of Infection Control, study findings reported that “In a multivariate model controlling for patient severity and nurse and hospital characteristics, only nurse burnout remained significantly associated with urinary tract infection (0.82; P = .03) and surgical site infection (1.56; P < .01) infection.”

So, it can be done. And needs to be done more often, linking nurse burnout statistics to outcomes that healthcare administrators are interested in. Then, taken a step further.

Burnout is real. It exists and impacts nurses and patients we care about. Once we realize this, then we can start to measure the impact that we can have on nursing burnout. But again, we need to focus on implementation projects that study the barriers and facilitators to why interventions impact and relieve nurse burnout across the spectrum.

Work is to be done, but there is hope. Nurses across the world are doing great things to move the nurse burnout needle. Will you be one of them?

Get your copy of Stop Nurse Burnout: https://elizabethscala.com/stop-nur...

Sue Rees, DNP, RN, CPHQ, CENP is the Vice President, Chief Nursing Officer-Inpatient at UW Health (University of Wisconsin). She has been there for 28 years starting as a Nurse Manager, then a Director, and for the past 6 years a VP. She has main responsibility for inpatient operations at this academic medical center.

A few take aways from our interview with Sue Rees, DNP, RN, CPHQ, CENP include:

• How self-reflection provides room for nursing growth;
• What using empathy can do for nursing resiliency;
• And why the lack of delegation may hold your nursing colleagues back!

Join the inspiring & upbeat community of supportive nurses: Your Next Shift!

Read along and take notes with your very own copy of Your Next Shift