The Experience of Being an Older Nurse - Essay Example

"The Experience of Being an Older Nurse" is an engrossing example of a paper on care.
During the interview with the nurse manager, many topical issues were discussed, relative to the challenges that nurse leaders face today in the unique healthcare environment of the present.  The interview took place over the span of about a half-hour, and the main themes that we talked about were challenges to nursing leaders.  The nurse manager, it seemed, was giving a series of warnings during the interview about what the situation was like for nurses just coming into the profession, and she was upset at one point in the interview when I asked her why she thought that so many nurses were leaving the profession.  This was the main question that really seemed to get the nurse manager talking most.

According to the nurse leader, there are many challenges in the nursing environment generally at this point in time, and some of these challenges and obstacles are more important than others in terms of how they affect the possible coping of the individual nurse in response to stress with various situations, from working extra shifts, to dealing with dying patients, to adjusting to new technology.  “It is a challenging time to be a nursing leader… Nurses currently experience much job stress, increasingly complex patient situations, dwindling resources, and increasing technology demands” (Letvak, 2003). The nurse leader talked about how many nurses are dangerously close to emotional exhaustion and burnout and are in strong need of coping skills, and she stressed that these skills can be taught.

In order to help nurses in palliative care cope, the nurse manager stressed how types of interactions faced by nurses in the healthcare environment should be measured to see how these factors of stress, burnout, and exhaustion affect nurses. She stated that nurses also need to learn adaptive coping strategies so that they can engage and communicate with each other as well.  Instead of relying on individual coping strategies, the advocated solution of the nurse leader was to give a group flavor to the coping of nurses and also, therefore, create workplace cohesion. I would categorize this as a type of leadership style that was democratic rather than authoritarian in nature.  The nurse manager mentioned that the staff of her healthcare facility was part of one of these unchanging situations where the job stressors are all a part of the everyday job, however, in terms of emotional, physical, and spiritual stress at work in nurses. The nurse leader mentioned that learning how to work together despite generation gaps can also help nurses cope more often.  From this nurse leader’s perspective, nurses can combat stress and can save many individuals within healthcare facilities from stress.  This stress, in the opinion of the nurse leader, maybe more tempered by training.

The nurse leader also mentioned how educating all nurses about the inevitability of death can also help in coping with mechanics.  Because as she mentioned, many nurses see death as an enemy and get stressed when a patient dies, instead of seeing life and death as a natural cycle.  So in this nurse leader’s opinion, education about dealing with death in facilities can also help nurses deal with this particular form of emotional and spiritual stress, dealing with the inevitable loss of life.  The nurse leader referred to this as death education and said that she thought it was necessary in order to understand and feel comfortable working around death.  She also mentioned that nurses may also be stressed out by thinking that they are just delaying the inevitable for a terminal patient, so she started her own education program to help change their minds, and help them to find proactive and good ways to combat their stress levels.  This shows the type of leadership that is programmatic and directional.  The nurse leader also highlighted emotional empathy issues with the client.

The nurse leader admitted her workers are also more likely to have the adverse sort of events that cause stress and emotional exhaustion in the workplace, especially in terms of dealing with patients who are dying and dealing with their friends and relatives on a regular basis.  She concluded by again saying that there are many different kinds of coping skills that nurses can employ to get beyond these boundaries and really learn something that they can apply in the real world.  She stressed the value of changing your mental assessment of a stressful predicament, showing possible traits of transformational leadership. This could mean anything from changing your point of view to learning to think about something, such as a patient dying, in a different way from a new perspective mentally. Other methods, the nurse leader stated, can’t be taught as easily, such as empathy.  In her opinion, empathy is an important possession for the nurse to have.  Empathy is characterized by vicariously experiencing another person’s emotional turmoil.  But this can be stressful as well. 

My reaction to this interview process was that the nurse leader was very calm and thoughtful. She appeared to be concerned with how her staff, especially new members, were coping with the stresses of their jobs, particularly dealing with patient deaths. In my own profession, I plan to apply this and to remember some of the things that this nurse leader said about death is natural, and not the enemy.  I think a lot of nurses see death as the enemy and get very stressed-out. I wasn’t expecting to learn much from this activity, but I was surprised that I brought this information with me, to keep.