Happy National Nursing Week!
Held every year during the week of Florence Nightingale’s birthday, May 12, it aims to bring more attention to the profession that affects the lives of so many Canadians.
This years theme is #WeAnswerTheCall. A theme that showcases the many roles that nurses play in a patient’s health care journey.
Nurses work hard to maintain the well-being of Canadians under their care. Some say tirelessly, but that isn’t true. Many are exhausted, burned out, depressed and angry.
The COVID-19 pandemic is in its third year, and it’s taken a toll on the professionals who are often on the front lines through the worst of it.
Dr. Dana Ménard is a clinical psychologist who is involved in a study funded by the WE-Spark Health Institute on how to better mentally equip nurses for the enormous stresses placed upon them.
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The first part of the study began with interviewing 36 nurses in 2020.
“In 2020, it was a lot about the shock and the chaos of the initial pandemic and then mobilizing, coming together to cope and learning to do things in a different way and feeling a sense of hope and optimism for the near future,” says Dr. Ménard.
Of the 36 nurses her team originally interviewed, 19 came back a year later for a follow-up.
“A year later, everybody was just wrecked,” says Dr. Ménard. “They were burned out. They were exhausted. They were furious with the government, with the public, with hospital management. They were struggling.”
These weren’t just new recruits fresh from school, some were also veterans of more than 20 years. They were also a mix of people working in the ICU (intensive care unit), the ER (emergency room), the NICU (neonatal intensive care), and other hospital units.
Dr. Dana Ménard. Credit: Screengrab, Mike Lacasse / XFM.
While they were all Canadians, some of them worked in Detroit.
“In the US we heard a lot about the avalanche of infections. They had a much higher death rate, so you know, [they were affected by] the kind of trauma associated with that,” says Dr. Ménard. “That group of nurses also experienced stigma from their communities. There was a perception that nurses living in Canada, but working in the US, were transmitting the virus in their communities.”
These nurses were told they couldn’t cash their cheques at the bank or come to their physiotherapy appointments in person among other things. They had become pariahs. Something other Canadian nurses who were just working in Canada didn’t have to deal with.
The researchers led by Dr. Ménard have taken all those stories and concerns and are hoping to turn it into a way to help prepare nurses for the inevitable stressors that will wear them down though they understand there’s only so much they can do.
Giving them the tools to recognize the signs of their own trauma and mental health burnout is one of the key steps they’re looking at.
“Healthcare professionals are, traditionally—even before the pandemic—a group not especially responsive to going to therapy for that kind of thing,” says Dr. Ménard. “One of the main responses that we were getting from people about why they weren’t seeking help was that ‘my problems aren’t severe enough.'”
Dr. Ménard also says that while there are certain aspects of the job they can train nurses in dealing with, some of their major stressors are systemic in nature.
“They still have to deal with things like not being able to take vacation time, or not being able to switch shifts, or being called in on their days off […] or even when therapy was made available it was often 9 to 5, 4 sessions and they’re like ‘that’s not going to do it and, by the way, I still need child care while this happens.'”
Of the team of 10 professors developing the program, 6 are in nursing with 4 being professors of nursing at the University of Windsor.
“One of the things that is important to us is that we not speak for the nurses, to say ‘here’s what you need’,” says Dr. Ménard. “One of the things that we’re doing is as part of this training program is setting up an advisory panel that’s going to include senior nursing students to say ‘hey, I’m graduating and here’s what I need to make the transition successfully’, but also nurses who have been working in the hospitals during this time who can say ‘okay, here’s the gaps. Here’s where I needed more preparation.'”
Dr. Ménard recognizes that while they can’t train away systemic problems, they can look into ways to empower nurses so that they can find ways to mitigate those issues.
“I think one of the things that I would consider in facilitating these discussions is ‘what is the role of advocacy’,” says Dr. Ménard. “Developing a stronger voice, coming together with their colleagues to push management, to push hospital CEOs to do what they can to look after the nurses.”
The program is being developed and will have a trial run at the University of Windsor, make modifications as needed, and then will be run again at Ottawa and Kingston to make sure they have something that’s useful with the goal of sharing it across Ontario and even Canada.
Dr. Ménard completed her internship at the London Health Sciences Center and she used to be a clinical psychology instructor at the University of Western Ontario and is now an instructor at the University of Windsor.
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