From the viewer’s perspective, nurses are seen as hardworking and loving caregivers in their communities and hospitals. In addition to this, nurses are also people with thoughts, feelings, and limitations on how much stress they can handle. Both areas of difficulty that I have encountered are caused by a lot of workplace stress for nurses. The first stress-inducing difficulty that nurses face is frequent overwork and the fear of making a mistake. Even though nurses have a restricted number of patients to care for, each patient needs a different degree of care if they are to get better (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2016). The nurse’s role is to provide care to each patient individually, which increases stress levels. Nurses are often afraid of making a mistake because they have a responsibility not only to their staff nursing boards but also to the patient and their health.
The second difficulty is the lack of human resources in nursing. One of the main reasons for this shortage is that nurses realize how easily they can burn out by being exhausted by their work most of the time. In turn, burnout means that the nurse is now completely morally disengaged from her work (American Psychological Association, 2019). If a nurse is morally cleared from her career, she becomes unable to care for her patients properly. To make matters worse, the demand for nursing care is increasing at a time when large numbers of experienced nurses are retiring. This could lead to the worst nursing shortage in generations over the next decade. Thus, workplace stress, and the resulting burnout, are among the significant problems for nursing staff at the moment.
References
American Psychological Association. (2019). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th Ed.). American Psychological Association.
Stanhope, M., & Lancaster, J. (2016). Public Health Nursing: Population-Centered Health Care in the Community (9th Ed.). Elsevier Mosby.