What nurse hasn’t heard the phrase “Nurses eat their own.”? You’ve probably witnessed it at some point in your career. Or maybe you’ve personally experienced the burn of cattiness, gossip, condemning verbal attacks, or bullying.

Plain old meanness seems to pervade nursing, and you wonder, Is there anything I can really do about it?

Letting this behavior go on will progressively change nursing for the worse. We’re [...]

Everyone has to work to stay positive. It’s human nature to focus on what went wrong. As a new nurse faced with situations that are terrifying and challenging, you have to work doubly hard at it.

All new nurses have been there: at a point of giving up because they’ve repeatedly told themselves they know nothing and will never get it all right. But you will. [...]

Tony Schwartz, founder and president of The Energy Project (theenergyproject.com), an organization currently launching a project to improve the nursing work environment, and co-author of The Power of Full Engagement, says that nurses are by nature better at caring about others than they are at caring for themselves.

Isn’t it time to start caring about your own health? In this exclusive RealityRN interview, Schwartz discusses how [...]

Drug addiction? That could never happen to me!

I wish that were the truth. I’m a nurse, and I certainly never thought I was vulnerable.

Not all nurses will develop the disease of addiction. But for many nurses, addiction is real. Substance abuse in the nursing population is believed to parallel or be slightly higher than that in the general population: approximately 10%. And it very often [...]

Simply, slow down.

That advice for new nurses comes from Sharon LaCroix, who experiences chronic neck and back pain because of 15 years as a nurse.

Nursing, obviously, is a physical profession. Aches and pains are the norm, after days filled with moving patients, lugging cumbersome equipment, wiggling around in awkward positions to accommodate patients. Even if you’re young, healthy, and physically fit, at the end of [...]

It was one of those days in the pediatric intensive care unit you’d love to forget.

One child, a 6-month-old girl, was in a vegetative state, both blind and deaf.  Her mother decided it was too painful to have any contact with her and had stopped visiting. The little girl’s father wanted everything done to save her. 

One morning, five minutes after Jana, a second year nurse, [...]