Nurse Healers Fear For Their Own Health

Not only are nurses exhausted – we the healers fear for our own health. On-the-job health risks for nurses range far beyond bloodborne pathogens and latex allergies (not to mention feeling like aliens dressed in our goggles, masks and gloves). We face obvious occupational hazards, such as back injuries from long shifts pounding hospital halls and doing more lifting with less help.

We also face the less obvious hazards that aren't just physical. Sheer exhaustion from our overwhelming schedules and our unsupportive work environment take a heavy toll.

Look around you at how many nurses smoke, drink and are overweight. These are signs of deep unhappiness and of not having time to take proper care of ourselves. Between juggling life, family and jobs, nurses often find it far easier to wolf down fast food on our 10-minute lunch break than to prepare a healthy brown-bag meal.

Isn't it ironic that the injured and disabled are treating the sick? No wonder the nurses dangerous workplace is yet another reason for the flight of such talented caregivers.

Nurses Choose a New Career and a New Life

The bright spot in this grim scenario – and the most distinctive aspect of today's nursing shortage – is that we can enjoy better, more satisfying careers as nurses elsewhere. Admit it, you know nurses who've left traditional nursing and are prospering and much happier in their new positions. Today, we're leaving younger, smarter and better qualified than ever before. We are creating our future rather than being victims of it.

Without even leaving the hospital setting, we are using our skills and training in areas we never thought possible: risk management, utilization review, accreditation and research. Beyond the hospital we're experiencing success selling medical- and nursing-related products, such as equipment, instruments, drugs and blood products. We're starting companies selling our own products and services, running our own agencies and working for insurance companies and major corporations.

Many of us are becoming legal nurse consultants, both in-house and independent. Most importantly, legal nurse consultants have just begun to penetrate the legal industry. I look forward to the day when it's considered legal malpractice for an attorney to work on a medical-related case without a legal nurse consultant on the team.

Wonder-Working Nurses Can Do Anything

Why am I confident that no nurse must be a victim of poor working conditions? Because nurses are trained to do three things simultaneously. For example, nurses make rapid, informed life-saving decisions while listening to the physician's orders and at the same time they console the patient and family members.

The average ICU has more complex instruments and monitors than the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, and a nurse operates every one of them! Forget Superman, Spiderman and Wonder Woman. I'll take a wonder-working nurse any day.

A career outside of traditional nursing can provide a nurse with a new purpose, a new attitude, new challenges, new rewards, new wealth and new respect. One place to find all these pluses and much more is in legal nurse consulting. If this field is not for you, look farther – the sky's the limit these days. The only way you'll find your star is by reaching for it.

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