While many throughout the U.S. are coping with the fear and uncertainty of COVID-19, healthcare workers must expose themselves to the virus every day.
In fact, it’s been found that nurses are experiencing conditions that have been compared to a war zone, continuously witnessing the direct effects of the pandemic as it spreads throughout communities.
With a lagging vaccine rollout, hospitals have been overwhelmed and short-staffed as the coronavirus reaches new peaks in the country, suffocating resources and stretching the nurses thin.
According to Nurse.org, on average, no matter the facility’s specialty, full-time employees on hospital nursing units typically work either three 12-hour shifts weekly (the days may or may not be consecutive), or in five eight-hour shifts. Round-the-clock coverage means many nurses must work weekends and holidays, usually on a rotating basis. Nurses, now more than ever are working their hearts out.
For years, Meisha Amia,35, knew this struggle first hand.
In 2016, the then 31-year-old registered traveling nurse attended a health workers’ conference when she realized the nurses there had no identity outside of their jobs. That’s when she decided to branch out and help other exhausted nurses do the same along the way.
Chicks with Cheques, her business coaching organization has served more than 20,000 nurses looking to become “more than a nurse” and enter the entrepreneur field.
“I really wanted to help these women rediscover themselves outside of the walls of the hospital,” she said. “Many of them had unfulfilled dreams of being an entrepreneur, but thought it was too late for them because of their demanding jobs.”
Now, according to her website, Meisha teaches nurses how to take contracts, doubling, and even tripling their incomes and become nurse entrepreneurs. To date, she’s earned more than $100,000 with her side business.
Meisha details this in her best-selling book, The Bedside Boss – From Scrubs to Six Figures. Now more than ever, Meisha aims to help nurses reach work-life balance to help save not only their patients’ lives but their own as well. This couldn’t have come at a more important time.
According to a 2020 survey by Mental Health America, many healthcare workers’ mental health has been on the decline since the pandemic.
The results showed that emotional exhaustion was the most common answer for changes in how healthcare workers were feeling over the previous three months (82%), followed by trouble with sleep (70%), physical exhaustion (68%) and work-related dread (63%).
Over half selected changes in appetite (57%), physical symptoms like headache or stomach ache (56%), questioning career path (55%), compassion fatigue (52%) and heightened awareness or attention to being exposed (52%).
Nurses reported having a higher exposure to the coronavirus (41%) and they were more likely to feel too tired (67%) compared to other healthcare workers (63%). About 39% said they didn’t feel like they had adequate emotional support. Nurses were even less likely to have emotional support (45%).
Meisha said that some of her participants have even transitioned completely out of nursing, started their own high-earning businesses and are happier than ever.
“Nurses often feel that society expects them to save everyone, except themselves, and it’s time for us to encourage nurses to look out for themselves and create comfortable lives.”
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