Are Nurses the Heroes That We Demand and Expect Them To Be During a Health Care Crisis?

Or Are They More?

My Surgery

More than eight months ago, I had an up close and personal encounter with health care professionals: doctors, nurses and technicians. I had double by-pass heart surgery and was in the ICU for four days and two days on the surgery recovery floor.

I still remember the care and compassion I received at their hands. One of my arteries was 100% blocked and the other was almost 90%. I was fortunate that I did not have a heart attack.

I can’t even begin to name all the doctors and nurses who came into my life during this short period of time. Aaron was a nurse practitioner who worked with the surgeon. He visited me on multiple occasions while I was in the hospital. He had worked with my surgeon for eight years. Male nurses are becoming more common in health care.

In ICU the nurses worked 12-hour shifts. I only vaguely remember the nurse who cared for me after surgery. As her shift was ending, she bathed me. Adam, another nurse, was very helpful. I remember him because his wife was an engineer. Another nurse who cared for me had received a degree in engineering but found out she didn’t like it, so she went back to school and became a nurse.

After I was discharged from the hospital, I was visited in my home by home health nurses once a week for four weeks. They monitored my vitals daily through a tablet that reported the information that I entered. Once I was strong enough I entered a 12 week outpatient exercise program where I was monitored by nurses and exercise therapists.

From the time I entered the health care system with a visit to a cardiologist until I was discharged was about 5 months. I met a lot of kind, caring and committed individuals who spend most of their days helping people who were hurting.

The caring and compassion did not surprise me. I have spent forty years of my life in health care management and have encountered thousands of caring health care professionals—people who go above and beyond the call of duty to help others in their time of need.

Nurses as Heroes?

I think, though, we have to be careful about turning nurses into heroes. They are human like the rest of us. They make mistakes. They have affairs. They get divorced. They struggle to raise their children. They go bankrupt because they can’t manage their money. They feel pain, become angry and lash out at others.

Americans have a habit of turning people into heroes, of placing people on a pedestal. And when we discover they have clay feet, that they don’t live up to our expectations, we knock them off the pedestal.

Being a nurse or a doctor is very demanding. And not everyone is cut out to work in health care. The demands start in school where students face difficult classes like biology, chemistry and human anatomy (all of which I avoided in college). My girl friend at the time dropped out of nursing because she failed anatomy and physiology. She settled on social work.

Not all nurses we encounter have the same education or experience. Some nurses are new graduates, only weeks or months out of school. Others have been on the job for years. I have met nurses in their 70s and 80s who are still working.

Education Levels

Just because people are nurses does not mean that they have had the same education. Many people start out as nursing assistants. A person can become a nursing assistant in a matter of weeks. I spent 10 months early in my career as an orderly in a hospital. I had 4 weeks of training.

Nursing homes depend on the nursing assistants to do the hard work of clothing, bathing and feeding the patients. They are paid the least of any of the nursing staff.

Hospitals vacillate back and forth. Depending on the care philosophy of the hospital, management may hire them or fire them. When I was in the ICU, there were only nurses, no assistants, but I had nursing assistants on the regular nursing floor.

Licensed Practical Nurses

The next step up from nursing assistants are the licensed practical nurses. Normally, LPNs (as they are called) have only one year of education and are given less responsibility.

I remember meeting an LPN in a nursing home who would have made an excellent Director of Nursing. She had great leadership skills, but because she was not a registered nurse she could not be promoted into the position.

Registered Nurses

The next level of nurse are the Registered Nurses (RNs). They can have either 2, 3 or 4 years of education. For years, hospitals trained nurses in 3 year programs that included lots of time and experience on the hospital wards with actual patients. They are called diploma nurses.

In the 1980s the education began to shift to community colleges and 4-year schools and the hospital programs were dropped. A person can attend a 2 year program at a community college and be able to be licensed as an RN. This person usually has very little direct patient care experience. People who attend a 4 year college will earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing. They have a broader education than the 2 year nurses but may not have much more hands on experience.

Nurse Practitioners

The nurses with the most education are the nurse practitioners. Depending on state regulatory laws, these nurses can actually setup a private practice like a doctor and be able to prescribe drugs. The concept of a nurse practitioner appeared in the 1960’s because there was a shortage of physicians. Nurse practitioners have become more accepted in the last 20+ years. I encountered several nurse practitioners during my recent hospital stay.

Employment

Nursing is a field dominated by women. In 2019 over 89% of the 4.2 million nurses were female according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of males has increased almost 4 fold in the last 50 years. In 1970 less than 3% of nurses were male compared to 11% today.

Seventy-eight percent are registered nurses and 17% are licensed practical nurses. Nurse practitioners make up 5% of nurses.

Nursing is a revolving door. Having a license, a nurse can travel anywhere. If a person is fired because her boss didn’t like her, she can always find a job elsewhere. But hiring is cyclical. Sometimes there are shortages and other times there are surpluses. There have been times when hospitals and nursing homes recruited nurses from other countries because they could not find enough nurses in the United States.

Most people enter the nursing field because they want to make a difference in people’s lives. These young people are very caring and compassionate. They desire to help others in a time of need. Few people enter the field because they want to get rich.

Once on the job, though, reality sets in. There are challenging staffing budgets, issues with the availability of supplies and issues with management. There are long hours, difficult doctors, sexual harassment, and the stress of watching someone die. Nurses can burnout after a few years and quit. Others quit because they decide to marry, to give birth to children, and choose to stay home.

Angels of Hope

So are nurses heroes? Patients often use a different word to describe the people who care for them: Angels. Nurses are angels of hope, angels of mercy, guardian angels. They give from their heart to help others in times of distress. They touch the lives of people.

Years ago a young woman came up to me after a speech and shared her story. When she was less than two years old, she was admitted to a hospital with encephalitis (an infection on the brain). Her family thought she was going to die.

A nurse in the hospital took extra special care of this infant. She carried her during her shift giving the baby the love and attention she needed. She stayed beyond her shift to give her the love and attention she needed.

The young woman credited the nurse with saving her life. The young woman said she had an opportunity to repay the nurse thirty years later when the nurse was admitted to the nursing home where she worked. She said that she clothed her, fed her, bathed her and assisted her in going to the bathroom. She said she was there holding the nurse’s hand when she passed out of this world.

Nurses are very special people and I have been privileged to work alongside them for the past 40 years. For me, they are more than heroes. They are angels of hope.

(This is dedicated to the thousands of nurses I have met and worked with in my life. Thanks for what you do.)

Copyright © 2020 by Harley King