Charles Kunkle

Time to Wake Up Healthcare

Earlier this year I was given the honor of speaking to over 10,000 nurses from over 20 countries. I will tell you as someone who speaks for a living, for the first time, I was nervous. This was the 2019 Magnet Conference where the best hospitals, and nurses, from all over the world gathered to learn and network. Would the message that I wanted to deliver resonate with the best that healthcare has to offer? Would my stories about engaging bedside caregivers in a healthcare environment where nurses feel overworked and overwhelmed be something they could relate to? 

About 5 minutes into my keynote I got my answer. While reminiscing about my reasons for joining this wonderful profession and my growing frustration about our inability to deliver true patient care, I felt the mutual angst as the crowd applauded and cheered. I could sense their frustration as I provided multiple reasons why I am saddened by the current state of nursing and healthcare’s insistence on focusing their energies only on the business of medicine. I quickly came to the conclusion that we are all feeling the same things.

No matter what part of this world you come from we all have this common bond. The values that we bring to our jobs are similar…compassion, empathy, and care. But studies show that nurses feel that they can’t practice nursing the way they want. It is for this reason we are losing nurses at an alarming rate. Nurses feel as though they are only seen as a cog in the wheel, making sure the organizations they work for hit the bottom line. They are excluded from the decisions that affect the care they deliver and the amount of tasks that they must complete on a daily basis. And this will cause significant challenges for the future.

In a study done by the RN Network, nearly half of 600 surveyed nurses (49.8%) in the U.S. are thinking about leaving nursing and most of them (27%) cite feeling overworked as the reason for leaving. If you consider the other factors affecting nurse morale like increasing incidents of violence, the diminishing of resources and the lack of healthcare reimbursement leading to an inability to appropriately staff nursing departments, it is easy to see that something must be done now to reverse these trends. 

Our task, healthcare, is to refocus our energies. To understand that without engaged caregivers our ability to meet the metrics, exceed the percentile rankings or improve our patient satisfaction scores will never be possible. When we acknowledge the challenges that nurses face every shift and give them a voice to create solutions to those problems, we empower them them.  When we find ways to create work environments that are fun to be a part of we energize them. And when we treat our nurses as a crucial and valuable part of our healthcare teams we engage them. Its time to wake up Healthcare and see that if we don’t start caring for our caregivers there won’t be anyone to care for the patients we need to serve.

 Charles Kunkle RN, MSN, CEN Charles is the Chief Engagement Officer for No Time To Care, a company dedicated to caring for the caregiver in today’s complex healthcare world. www.notimetocare.com