“This is me. A nurse by trade, but no longer nursing. Instead, I’m using that same drive to care, to help people help themselves.
Yesterday, Jen and I were at a nursing study day to keep our registration valid and up to date.
One of the things I remember from that day is how fed up, run down, demoralized, and actually unhealthy a lot of health care staff actually are.
They are expected to run solely on good will by a massive organization which couldn’t really give two sh*ts about its staff, and isn’t really in the game of supporting staff even when they are in need of it.
I was once accused of contacting and sending hugely incorrect and inappropriate messages to a patient who had tried to find me on social media and instead had found a DIFFERENT Alex Coulson.
During that time the organization that I worked for, banned me from work, told me I would possibly get the sack and lose my registration, and I couldn’t contact anyone except my union (any of the staff who could prove my side of the story).
This lead to high levels of stress, anxiety and worry I would be out of a job I had spend three years training for.
When it was all cleared up and it was proven it wasn’t me, there was zero apology, no thoughts of how they could deal with it better, nothing.
Too often, massive companies will just leach its staff dry of their health and then wonder why their sickness numbers are so high. They will try to put into place some kind of mindfulness practice for its staff to shut them up and tick a box to show they ‘give a sh*t’ when they really couldn’t give a f*ck.
This is one of the reasons I left nursing. There are better ways for me to live my life, which serves me as a healthy human and in a way I can help others before they become so unwell they need to be in hospital.
Put your self and your health, especially mental health, first. There are always ways for you to do what you love and live a happier, healthier life. Sometimes we just have to be able to look up to see them.
The biggest and easiest change would be to staff the hospitals properly. To have a safe level of nurses per patients. That’s easier said than done, as it’s a weird, old career for many to think about taking up, so it would end up needing to be incentivized better. It’s a pretty long story around pay, etc. In all honesty, a lot of the time it would be nice if management and the agency’s could see how 99.9% of nurses are there because they love their jobs, and just want to be helping people. They really just want to be supported. Most nurses do what they do because they love it… would they like to be paid a wage which meant they could live a bit easier, of course, but most of the time it comes down to respect and care for the staff. That seems to me what is lacking is the current culture. Hoping to inspire future change!”
This story was submitted to Love What Matters by Wibbs Coulson. You can follow his journey on Instagram, and you can follow her church on Facebook and their website. Submit your own story here, and be sure to subscribe to our free email newsletter for our best stories, and YouTube for our best videos.
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