By Megan M. Krischke, contributor
“I haven’t met a nurse who isn’t stressed,” said Jane Cornman, Ph.D., APRN, of the University of Washington (UW) School of Nursing. “But the difference between stress and burnout is that those experiencing burnout have lost their capacity to care on an ongoing basis. They are unable to be empathetic or present to the patient. They tune out more and more, and work becomes less and less rewarding to them.”
Marie-Annette Brown, RN, Ph.D., and Professor at UW School of Nursing, believes that a lot of nurses experience burnout because they are not able to do the job they were trained to do.
“Because many facilities are watching the bottom line, nurses don’t have the time they need to truly care for patients,” Brown remarked. “My heart breaks for the things my patients go through, but that isn’t what is stressful to me. I feel the pain and that is okay—it makes me feel alive and good that I’ve been able to help. But when I don’t have the time to truly care for a patient—that is exhausting.”
Many nurses feel that their only options when experiencing burnout is either to change places of employment or types of nursing, or to leave the field altogether.
According to data from the National Sample Surveys of Registered Nurses, which included feedback from 35,635 RNs, more than 27 percent of nurses who had left the profession cited burnout or stressful work environments as the reason for doing so.
Elsah Cort, RN, CMT, is offering another option—retreats dedicated to nurses who need guidance and help to reconnect with their passion for nursing.
Cort graduated from nursing school nearly forty years ago and, in that time, she has worked in ICU, psychiatric, hemodialysis, medical-surgical and home health nursing, and knows first hand the stressors, pressures and demands that nurses experience on a daily basis.
“After all these years of caring for patients, I now find myself assigned to care for the nurses who find themselves in a ‘burnout’ place,” reflected Cort.
Drawing on her own professional and personal burnout experiences, Cort’s three-day retreats are “working” retreats help participants shift their thinking from traditional understandings of medicine to more holistic understandings about healing and the healing process.
“The retreat is like a care plan for nurses,” Cort said.
Cort’s retreat provides 30 hours of continuing education credits for nurses with California or Nevada state licenses and aims to meet several objectives, including:
* Offering foundational information about the origins and stages of burnout.
* Providing practical ways to experience burnout transformation.
* Encouraging the participant to read, journal and discuss a diverse range of ideas and approaches regarding different aspects of healing.
* Supporting the nurse in ways that are compatible with a holistic nursing philosophy.
* Encouraging nurses to reinvent their work experience through changing the way they think about healing.
Also during the retreat there are reading and studying assignments each evening, artistic and meditative explorations and—one of the highlights—reflective walks through Sequoia National Forest.
“The change each person experiences at the retreat is different,” remarked Cort. “The retreat isn’t a conclusion, but a step in a process. The hope I have is that the nurse attending the retreat would come away seeing their situation in a new light and be open to new possibilities in a way they weren’t before.”
For more information on Cort’s retreats, go to www.thedeeperwell.com.
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