Top Things to Know: Nursing Wellness in Academic and Clinical Cardiovascular and Stroke Nursing
Published: December 18, 2024
Prepared by Nancy Pike, PhD, CPNP-AC/PC, FAHA; Professor | Founding Associate Dean for Research; Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing; University of California, Irvine
- Nursing is an essential part of our health care system workforce. Cardiovascular (CV) and stroke nursing represent one of the largest specialty areas requiring expert knowledge and clinical proficiency to ensure safety and quality patient outcomes.
- The concept of “nursing wellness” is not new but has come to the forefront over the past 5 years due to nurses experiencing unprecedented demands during the COVID pandemic, leading to professional burnout.
- Nurses aged 35 and younger report the highest turnover intention and the lowest job satisfaction and emotional well-being compared to nurses aged 55 and older.
- Sixty-three percent of full-time academic nursing faculty are age 50 or older. The nurse-educator shortage will continue to worsen, further reducing student capacity and restricting the profession's growth.
- The nursing shortage also impacts nursing research, with less than 1% of the nursing workforce earning a PhD. Nurse scientists are in high demand and insufficient to supply our future academic, research, and leadership positions.
- The paper highlights nursing roles and key drivers of burnout, which include:
- Nurse Clinician - excessive workload and long working hours, perceived low compensation, exposure to death and suffering, high-pressure patient environments, high clinical complexity.
- Nurse Educator - growing workload demands secondary to faculty shortages, increased teaching assignments resulting in loss of work-life balance, dissatisfaction with workload, salary, and availability of teaching support.
- Nurse Scientist - balancing research responsibilities and clinical practice, academic teaching, administrative responsibilities, securing research funding, meeting grant deadlines with limited institutional research support, publication requirements, and mentoring responsibilities.
- Strategies to mitigate burnout for nurse clinicians include focusing on the working environment and professional growth and development; the nurse educator on teaching resources, career support, and compensation; and the nurse scientist on research support, mentorship, and compensation.
- Many key drivers and strategies to mitigate burnout or improve wellness are not solely specific to CV and stroke nurses, and many strategies are being implemented at many institutions.
- With the critical shortage of nurses, stress, exhaustion, and burnout threaten the nursing profession's sustainability and well-being. Many nursing organizations and academic institutions are looking closer at ways to preserving this vital workforce.
- Future research is needed to explore strategies that ensure diversity in the nursing workforce, create resources for wellness and types of interventions most often sought out, focus on developing a culture of wellness in the workplace, test interventions specific to settings and roles, and analyze the cost-benefit of wellness-based interventions and programs, with the goal that all nurses live their healthiest possible lives while providing vital CV and stroke care.
Citation
Pike NA, Dougherty CM, Black T, Freedenberg V, Green TL, Howie-Esquivel J, Pucciarelli G, Souffront K, St. Laurent P; on behalf of the American Heart Association Council on Cardiovascular and Stroke Nursing; Council on Clinical Cardiology; and Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health. Nursing wellness in academic andclinical cardiovascular and stroke nursing: a scientific statement from the American Heart Association. J Am Heart Assoc. Published online December 18, 2024. doi: 10.1161/JAHA.124.038199