Nurses are the backbone of our health care system
Without nurses our health care system would collapse. As a doctor, I may know when someone is dehydrated and needs fluids. Or when their blood pressure is down and they need to go on IV medications to start their heart. But if you handed me an IV line and asked me to mix up Levophed I would stand there like an idiot. Doctors give the “orders” but nurses carry them out. And they learn so much from years of training on the job that they understand how and why we carry them out. Let me tell you, if I was stranded on a desert island and could choose a nurse or a doctor to be with me, it would be a nurse hands down everytime. These are the people who are at the bedside. While my interventions may make you feel better physically, most nurses are better at making the patient feel better emotionally. They get to talk to the patient and hold their hand, listen to their fears. And not just listen, but they predict what their patient or resident is worried about and anticipates their needs.
I want to give a notable shout out to my nursing home nurses. For many, a nursing home job is considered the least “sexy” of all the nursing jobs. And yet there are some nurses who despite the lower pay, lower status, and longer hours, take this as their calling. They walk with residents through their rehab, and walk with patients and their families in their final years. I have had the honor of working with many nurses at North Country Nursing and Rehab in Massena, and Tupper Lake Nursing and Rehab, and have not met more hardworking or dedicated people. Like all nurses, they work late, come in early, or fill any gaps they can. I have seen them do the jobs of nurses aides when they were short staffed. They make my job one million times easier. Even when it is their day off, they will message me about something about one of “their” residents. They truly treat each and every one of the residents as if it were their parent or grandparent.
Which is why it makes me so sad when (about once a month), I am notified about a family yelling or screaming at them. These nurses have been hit by residents, spit on, gotten every possible bodily fluid on their person, and been pulled in every different direction. The ratio of nurses to residents at nursing homes is much lower than nurses to patients in the hospital. And when families yell at them for not being fast enough to talk to them about their stable family member, when we have other residents sick that need to be attended to earlier, it breaks my heart. Because these nurses do not sit down their entire shift.
Healthcare burnout is real. There are more glamorous nursing positions these nurses can choose to take… and get paid more. They stay because, like myself, they have a passion for geriatrics. Don’t hate on them. They love their residents. They wish they could be at the bedside talking to you, and not charting, or needing to be in five rooms at once.
The reality is that our nation does not value our elders. The reimbursement for nursing home stays is abysmal. The government does not prioritize senior care. So until the American people make their congressmen care, there will always be less nurses in the facility that anyone would like.
So please, have some empathy for them. Understand that they do care, they are working very hard, and they deserve your respect. If we don’t, we will lose more of them to burnout, and then we will have no nursing homes in the county at all.
Nurse’s Week is coming up May 6- May 12. Send your favorite Nurse a thank you text, or card. They deserve all the recognition.
