National efforts underway to address well-being, burnout among nurses
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Efforts in Congress and among national organizations are underway to help nurses address burnout and mental health, a speaker said during the Nephrology Nursing Practice Management and Leadership Conference.
“ ... We have seen a tremendous increase in the concern about nurses’ mental health and well-being over the last 2 years,” Ernest J. Grant, PhD, RN, FAAN, president of the American Nurses Association (ANA), told attendees. “Without nurses, there is no health or health care.”
The hybrid conference was organized by the American Nephrology Nurses Association (ANNA).
Grant said ANA began polling its membership during the COVID-19 pandemic to determine how they were dealing with the stressful environment and high acuity of patient care. The polls showed that 52% of respondents said they were experiencing mental fatigue from the pandemic. “The pandemic compounded the day-to-day stresses that nurses were already experiencing,” he said.
The challenges were compounded by a nursing shortage, creating more stress in the workplace, Grant said. “That crisis has placed challenges on nurses to give the quality care they want to provide,” he said.
Healthy lifestyle
ANA has worked with other foundations in the United States to help nurses cope, including the development of healthy lifestyle programs, like Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation. “We have close to a half a million nurses participating in this program,” Grant said. It includes guidance on getting proper sleep, good eating choices and exercise.
Even before the pandemic, nephrology nurses were stressed out from their work environment, James W. Twaddell, a senior policy advisor at Venable LLP, in Washington, D.C., and the health policy consultant for the ANNA, told attendees.
“Prior to COVID-19, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) recognized that clinicians are experiencing alarming rates of burnout that can lead to serious consequences, including reduced job performance, increased turnover, medical errors and clinician suicide,” Twaddell said.
NAM called for a focus on clinician well-being as an essential element of safe, high-quality patient care, Twaddell said. In 2017, NAM established the Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience to address the clinician burnout crisis.
Grant is a member of the collaborative, which is part of NAM’s National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being and Resilience program.
After Lorna Breen, MD, medical director of the emergency department at New York- Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died by suicide in April 2020, the Action Collaborative began working with Congress to advance legislation to provide mental health training, education and workforce training to assist medical professionals in coping with stresses created in the health care environment. President Joe Biden recently signed legislation to fund the program, Grant said.
The Clinician Well-Being Collaborative has three goals, including the following:
- raise the visibility of clinician anxiety, burnout, depression, stress and suicide;
- improve baseline understanding of challenges to clinician well-being; and
- advance evidence-based, multidisciplinary solutions to improve patient care by caring for the caregiver.
Other efforts to aid the well-being of nurses come from an initiative by the U.S. Surgeon General. Addressing Health Worker Burnout: U.S. Surgeon General Advisory: Building a Thriving Health Workforce developed several recommendations to reduce burnout, Twaddell said. These include broad efforts to do the following:
- transform workplace culture to empower health workers and be responsive to their voices and needs;
- protect the health, safety and well-being of all health workers;
- reduce administrative burdens to help health workers have productive time with patients, communities and colleagues;
- prioritize social connection and community as a core value of the health care system; and
- invest in the public health workforce.
“A safe work environment is what nurses are saying is the number one concern,” Grant said. “It is time to put our foot down and say, ‘This is unsafe.’”
Collapse
Twaddell JW. Mental well-being of nephrology nurses: A health policy and advocacy perspective. Session #231. Presented at: Nephrology Nursing Practice Management and Leadership Conference, Oct. 1-3, 2022, San Diego.
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts