In my last post I shared with you some areas of nursing which seem to have the greatest number of nurses experiencing compassion fatigue. While the list was pretty long, ranging from hospice to pediatrics to oncology, the one department that seems to take the cake is emergency medicine. But why emergency medicine over all others? In order to under stand why this one area is more stressful than others I think we need to look at some of the other areas.
Hospice was first on the list I gave. For those of you who may be unsure, hospice is "end of life care" (MedlinePlus, 2012) including medical, psychological, and spiritual support. They give medical, psychological and spiritual support. Hospice nurses go into situations with patients already knowing the out come. The challage in this specialty comes when the rest of the nursing world's goal is to make you better and send you on your way, the hospice nurse has already accepted the fact that their patients aren't going to get better and does what he or she can to insure the patient's comfort and dignity remain intact.
Pediatrics is another area on the list. This is a broad term but usually encompasses patients from new borns to the age of 21 years old (older in some areas). Children are great and can bring a lot of joy to the world; however, the working with pediatric patients can be a challenge. It's hard enough for nurses to care for the ill without it taking a toll on them but when the one who is sick is a child it makes things that much harder. We look at children as innocent and often think of their loss as "tragic" while justifying the loss of an older person in our heads. While no one deserves to be sick, we cannot justify the illness of a child and watching day by day as they succumb to an illness can be heartbreaking.
I've just discussed two areas of high stress areas of nursing and just a few of the reasons for the stress. Hospice nurses we now know have to deal with death quite often and pediatric nurses often have to watch children induring pain or an illness both of which can wear on a nurse after some time. But why would emergency medicine/nursing be any more stressful or pose any higher of a risk to the nurses practicing them? Emergency medicine encompasses challenges faced by both of the other two areas. When working in an emergency department you're faced with trauma and death almost daily. Where do parents take their extremely ill children especially when it's the middle of the night and the pediatricians office is closed? The emergency department gets patients from all aspects of nursing rolling all of the challenges into one place.
Sources:
Hospice Care: MedlinePlus. (n.d.).
National Library of Medicine - National Institutes of Health. Retrieved March 12, 2012, from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/hospiceca
