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The Unseen Pandemic Impacting Healthcare Providers

Pharmacist assisting a customer with a question about and over-the-counter product By Dr. McKenzie Grinalds, Dr. Jeff Huston, Dr. Zachary Jenkins
��Vlog School of Pharmacy

Burnout and work-related stress are not new issues in health care. But according to the September 2022 Journal of American Medicine, the COVID-19 pandemic has poured kerosene on that fire, leading health care professionals to work under increasingly difficult conditions. In particular, pharmacists were called upon to drive patient care during the pandemic, without changes to their typical job function. Economic forces and personnel shortages have further impacted care.

Such conditions have led to what many are calling the “Great Resignation.” In health care, this has manifested as an exodus of health care workers from frontline patient care roles. For example, according to Elsevier Health, 31% of physicians and nurses globally said they planned to leave their current role in the next two-to-three years.

Looking at respondents from the United States, that number is even higher — 47%. In 2021, the Ohio Board of Pharmacy reported that 16% of Ohio pharmacists reported planning to leave their career as a pharmacist altogether, while 40% of respondents indicated they were open to changing careers in the future. This is alarming, as many pharmacists already operate in health care deserts where options for patients are few.

Something must change, but what?

Balancing Job, Family, and Grad School: 5 Principles for Christian Nurses

Nurse practitioner standing in front of patient “How do you do it?”

That was usually the question that people asked after they discovered that I was enrolled full time as a graduate student in the dual-track Nurse Educator and Family Nurse Practitioner focus areas in the M.S.N. program at ��Vlog. As a wife, mom of three under 12, contingent nurse at an inpatient hospital unit, adjunct clinical professor, and active member of the church, I understood why they were asking. When I felt the Lord calling me to pursue a degree as a nurse educator and family nurse practitioner, I entered with prayerful fear and trembling. Hanging over my computer — where I have spent countless hours (many during a pandemic and many during long nights) — were the following 5 guiding principles that helped me balance my job, family, and graduate school.

How Should Christian Nurses Respond to COVID Burnout?

by Scott Long, MS, RN, AGACNP-BC, CCRN

Nurse caring for a child in hospital Critical care is a job that I have felt called to since day one of nursing school and have since expanded my skills to an Acute Care Nurse Practitioner in the Intensive Care Unit. I have felt blessed and honored to be a person whom God has given an ability to provide comfort to patients and/or families. This is a stressful job that can be rewarding but also leave you walking out of work crying alone or in a co-worker’s arm. The COVID-19 pandemic has added even more to stress, anxiety, and even burnout, but that is where we need a strong support system of people. We can confide in others but, ultimately, we can get so tied up with our professional occupation and keeping up on the most up-to-date information that we lose time with God. If there is anything we need to do more than ever is to spend time in God’s Word and prayer to provide us with spiritual and mental strength through life’s storms personally and professionally.

Over the last 18 months, we have watched COVID-19 grow from what at first was distant, unless you lived in China, where it all started. This virus spread increased in size and its impact became evidently clear as it deprived hospitals of critical care beds in certain areas to even have the U.S. Navy deploy the hospital ships to Los Angeles and New York City as well as Samaritan’s Purse deploying a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to set up field hospitals in Central Park and in Italy to allow an opportunity to expand the access of critical care capabilities. Now we see the Delta variant stretching healthcare, hospitals at capacity with not just COVID but in general higher acuity patients. It feels we are continuing in disaster response status. As Christian health workers, what should be our perspective and response at this time and how can we help reduce burnout among nurses?

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