![]() Sign up for our nursing newsletter for the most recent nursing news, find your next nursing job today and check out our N ursing Career Center! Have you ever dealt with trauma as a nurse? What did you do to cope with traumatic stress in nursing? Be sure to tweet me or leave a comment below. The more that these experiences can be processed, the better (and faster) the healing can occur. Instead of acting as if the stressful situation didn't happen, bring the nursing team together and talk about the event. Patients come and go all the time, so why are we having such a tough time with this particular death? Guess what? You may not be the only nurse on your unit struggling with the pain. One mistake that happens often in healthcare is that we brush traumatic experiences under the rug as ‘just part of the job’. Do things that you enjoy and surround yourself with positive people and energy.ĥ. While the mind may want to focus on this memory (which is totally normal), we need to busy ourselves with positive distractions. It's a jarring, chaotic and unpleasant experience. The reason that a stressful experience creates trauma is because it's something unwanted. The stress needs to be dealt with so that it can slowly fade away.Ĥ. Placing some sort of band-aid over it, like food or alcohol, will only mask it for a while. The trauma will still be there, and if it's not dealt with, may never fully go away. While these remedies may provide relief in the short-term, they will do more harm than good over time. Sometimes when people experience difficult situations, they turn to cigarettes, food, alcohol or drugs to cope. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day to get in a sleep groove.ģ. The best way to get a good night’s rest is to attempt to regulate your body's sleep schedule. Writing in a journal, going to a support group of survivors to talk it out and limiting caffeine intake close to bed can also help. If you're having trouble sleeping, you might need to get professional help from your physician. We can't fall asleep, or if we do, we are abruptly woken up by nightmares related to the event. Lots of symptoms related to post-traumatic stress happen at night. And, if it is a sunny day, spending a bit of time outside in nature can actually improve your mood as you soak up the natural vitamin D.Ģ. You need to get up and moving, even if that just means taking a shower and then a walk around the neighborhood. But this is no way to deal with the stress. We want to crawl into bed and never get out from under the covers. Experiencing trauma (especially repeated trauma) can be debilitating. No matter what, you need to get up and moving. Here are five tips to help ease the pain of traumatic experiences in nursing:ġ. If you have experienced serious secondary trauma stress as a nurse, I would encourage you to seek out support and get professional help, when needed.īut there are plenty things that you can do on your own, which is what we will cover below. How do we continue to care when we are constantly witnessing such unsettling experiences? How do we show up at work day after day when we know the next patient we see could be to be worse off than the one before?įirst off, let me say right up front, I am not a trauma expert - nor am I someone to be giving out medical or psychological advice. This is what secondary trauma syndrome is all about.Īnd nurses deal with this all of the time.Ī pediatric nurse loses a patient who has been battling a chronic disease for months an ER nurse witnesses the effects of domestic violence as a battered woman comes to get her cuts and bruises treated a forensic nurse cares for patients who are raped and tortured. As she told me the story, it was as though she was reliving the experience all over again. She started to share with me, with a shaky voice and teary eyes, how, when she worked on her pediatric unit, a nurse had overdosed in the supply room. My colleague became very quiet, as if shutting down. I asked her what was wrong. As we got closer to the makeshift altar, we realized - a nurse on this unit had just died. When we arrived, there was a candle lit in the conference room and a photo of a man in scrubs. Recently, a colleague and I went out to visit a nursing unit. No two experiences are quite the same, and each one feels just as hard as another. Whether it's the death of a patient, the serious injury of a child or the loss of a co-worker. ![]() ![]() No matter what type of nursing you do, at one time or another in your career, you will experience trauma. Find your next nursing job today and check out our N ursing Career Center!
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