“Take care of yourself!” - Wouldn’t it be nice if your job description included this directive?

Unfortunately, nurses, who pour themselves into caring for others, are notorious for self-neglect. There’s no one around to make sure you make “you” a priority.

It’s a conundrum—you know you ought to take better care of yourself, but you don’t. Maybe you’re too tired to care. Maybe you don’t know [...]

Laura’s plate of cookies sits at the nurses' station after the unit potluck. You walk by and take one. It’s just a harmless cookie. When you pass by again, you take another. Pass again: another cookie. By the end of your shift, you’re not sure how many cookies—and calories—you have consumed.

Gretchen Vanderbosch, a dietician for Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington, IL, calls this cookie [...]

“I thought having knowledge of addiction protected me from developing an addiction.

“I thought I was immune,” says Patricia Holloran, RN.

But she was wrong. A recovering drug addict, Holloran has become a strong advocate for other nurses facing the same struggle.

Most nurses think they will never fall into addiction, but, according to Holloran, even as healthcare professionals, nurses are vulnerable.

Look around your unit: You may [...]

Addiction: it’s a moral issue, right? Whoever starts abusing a drug is a bad person, making a bad choice, and should be punished. At the very least, they should be able to quit on the spot.

But it’s not that simple. According to Dr. Linda Barile, APRN, and advocate for nurses who are addicts, we need to stop blaming them and instead support them through recovery.

Here [...]

Nights: You either loathe them or love them. But as a new nurse you usually don’t get to choose your ideal shift. Nights are often all that’s available. And either you adjust, or you don’t.
 
Melissa Granger, an oncology nurse at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital in Elmhurst, Illinois, was “on the brink of depression” because she couldn’t handle nights when she first graduated.

But Christy James, a labor [...]

Extreme tiredness, negative feelings, weight gain, and marital problems.

One moment, Kayla thought she was depressed and that medication would help. Another moment, she thought her husband was the problem and that she should quit her marriage.

But Kayla wasn’t depressed. She suffered from something that affects many professional caregivers.

In recent years, Mary Jo Barrett, author and social worker from the Center for Contextual Change, in Elmhurst, [...]