Nurses are risking their mental health to keep working

For almost two years, the healthcare industry has been operating in the midst of chaos. And now, the very people who kept it standing throughout the pandemic are starting to crumble.

According to a recent survey by nursing agency platform IntelyCare, more than a third of all nurses report prioritizing their job over everything else in life. Now, they’re suffering in silence, sacrificing their mental health in service of their work.

“These mental health issues keep being referred to as burnout, and I think that's a misclassification — burnout implies that the nurse is the failure of the system,” says Intely’s chief clinical officer and registered nurse, Rebecca Love. “The reality is that we're seeing PTSD in our nursing population due to the experiences that they've witnessed over the last two years on the front line.”

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That’s putting the future of the entire nursing profession at risk. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 500,000 seasoned nurses are expected to retire between now and the end of 2022, creating a shortage of 1.1 million nurses — a mass exodus that was accelerated nearly 20 years by the pandemic. But the problem, Love says, started long before COVID-19.

“Nurses have been calling out for a greater amount of supportive resources,” she says. “[They] want to be there, they want to do their job, but they’re sacrificing their family and their personal time because and that's something that we know is not sustainable.”

And although hospitals and nursing homes are trying to boost support, many of their efforts — such as encouraging their nurses to do a yoga class or listen to a meditation app — are like putting band-aids on bullet holes, according to Love. These institutions, she says, have not invested in workforce management tools that actually empower the nurses to work in a way that meets their life requirements.

“These things further take away time from what nurses really want,” Love says. “Which is more time with their family.”

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Instead, healthcare institutions rely on antiquated staffing and shift scheduling systems that disempower the nurse. Nearly 40% of nurses can’t take time off when they want to, the survey found. More than a quarter of nurses didn’t take a vacation in 2021.

“Nurses are missing birthdays and weddings and funerals because they cannot find coverage,” Love says. “And these nurses are just throwing up their hands and they're walking away as opposed to trying to make it work.”

Over a third of nurses do not feel supported in their mental health at work and 41% feel that they lack overall support from their system's senior management, the survey found. The majority of nurses do have access to some form of mental health care through their employer — most of which is basic coverage built into existing plans — but just 10% utilize it, because they don’t feel encouraged to prioritize that care.

“If hospitals just invested in [workforce management] technology so they aren't keeping nurses tied to this archaic platform, these workers would feel some value,” Love says. “The mental health trauma is coming from feeling unseen, unheard and undervalued by a healthcare system that keeps asking them to do more.”