‘Courage and candour aren’t just for patient matters, we must look after ourselves too’ | Nursing Times

In the next few weeks I’ll transition to working nights, to fulfil the Nursing and Midwifery Council expectation that student nurses experience a 24/7 care service.
I am exhausted, and I’m only a handful of weeks into this placement. I have so much empathy for those who go home after long days to children or other caring responsibilities.

“I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that students talking about it is important”

I am, luckily, still in love with nursing, so please don’t take this as complaining. I have noticed though, that unlike any other work I’ve done, even on my days off, I am almost too tired to enjoy them. I’m waiting for my body to catch up with this new routine, but it seems to be taking its time getting there.

Now, this is starting to seem like a theme. Burnout seems as if it’s a simply an inevitability for nurses. Mix long-term low staffing levels with an all-time high demand on the system and it’s the perfect storm, and particularly prevalent in the younger, newly qualified nurses.

Some figures suggest that a quarter of nursing sick days are for anxiety, stress and burnout – creating the cyclic problem of low staffing. This of course inevitably has an impact on patient care and safety. If we’re honest with ourselves, it’s nearly impossible to be compassionate when all you really want is for a moment to stop.

So it isn’t just a difficulty students deal with, and there is a growing body of work around the danger of long days – for patients and staff alike.

In no other industry would some of the riskiest tasks such as medication administration be done at the end of long days when staff are at the most fatigued and most at risk of errors purely out of physical exhaustion.

Among students there is a sense that some people are cut out to be ‘ward’ nurses and some are not, preferring outpatients or community – a lot of this is coming from people’s feelings about long days. It isn’t all misery, of course it means that you get more ‘days off’ in a week and that is a strong preference for many people.

I don’t think long days are going anywhere, anytime soon, if only because there simply isn’t the staff to run three shorter shifts over the day. Do I think that it might make nursing a more attractive proposition for students and keep more experienced staff members on the wards longer? I do.

I’m very lucky that I have the energy and support system to manage a few months of burning the candle at both ends, but so many don’t. Many others will have essays to write, children to look after, part time jobs to work, nobody else to kindly help with cooking and cleaning. It’s little wonder that student nurse attrition is massive, as much as 25%, with universities asking so much of students.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that students talking about it is important. I recently had the pleasure of talking to my university’s placement team, and what they didn’t know about the student placement experience scared me.

They can’t know what we don’t tell them though – so my heartfelt, if tired, plea is this: please talk about the struggles. Courage and candour aren’t just for patient matters, we must look after ourselves too.

Lucy Allen is a second-year, adult and mental health nursing student at the University of Plymouth and 2023-24 Nursing Times student editor