Nursing News

Nursing is an incredibly important profession, but also an incredibly exhausting one. Few other jobs have such a large emotional component; nurses must deal with literally life-and-death situations on a daily basis.

The term “compassion fatigue” was coined about twenty years ago to describe the emotional state that some nurses reach when the emotional toll has become just too much.

An article in St. Louis Today outlines a program called which provides a curriculum for nurses wishing to become more emotionally resilient. You can’t control the stresses of nursing, but you can control how you respond to them.

The program’s curriculum taught the nurses five steps to resiliency:

• Self-regulation, which involves learning exercises to reduce stress when they perceive a threat. (more…)

As if the night shift were not already unpleasant enough, a new study indicates that it may also increase your risk for developing type 2 diabetes.

The risk seems to be especially marked if you work a rotating shift for a long time.

“For nurses who spent a couple of years working rotating night shifts, there was a minimal increase in risk. But, for those with a very long duration of rotating shifts, the risk was almost 60 percent higher. This provides pretty strong evidence that the longer the rotating night shift work, the greater the risk of diabetes,” [Dr. Frank] Hu said.
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