EP 67: Burnout and Resilience: Strategies for Balance and Well-Being in Nursing

CB 67_Dr. Perry Gee: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

CB 67_Dr. Perry Gee: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Plants thrive and grow in a peaceful, nourished environment, right? Well, it's the same with human beings. But what if that environment is not so peaceful? What if it's toxic? Welcome to Coffee Break: Breaking the Cycle of Bullying in Healthcare – One Cup at a Time. In this podcast, you'll get practical, evidence-based strategies to help you cultivate and sustain a healthy and respectful work culture by tackling an age-old problem in healthcare: bullying and incivility. I am your host, Dr. Renee Thompson.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Hi, everyone! Welcome back to another episode of the Coffee Break podcast. Okay, in 2022, the McKinsey report showed that the number one cause of burnout and an intention to leave for toxic workplace behaviors. Okay, but is it that simple? Can we talk about burnout? And we talk about intention to leave? Really? What's driving it? Well, today, we're going to chat with Dr. Perry Gee, who is a nurse scientist and the Director of Nursing Research and Evidence-based Practice for Intermountain Health. And he happens to be my very good friend. So, Perry, welcome to the show.

Dr. Perry Gee:
Wow, Renee. It is so nice to see you. And yes, we have been friends for a long time now. It's going to be approaching 20 years here pretty soon, which is absolutely wonderful, and what a privilege it is for me to spend time with you.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Well, you're one of my favorite humans on Earth: you and your wife, Julie, your three daughters, and now your gazillion grandchildren. And we were talking before we hit record that you have, what, five and one on the way?

Dr. Perry Gee:
Yes, five and one on the way.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Yeah. So we've been friends for a long time, and it started because Perry invited me to speak at an event that he was hosting, and I think it was around Nurses Week, wasn't it? When you were at was it Simpson University?

Dr. Perry Gee:
Simpson University in Northern California?

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Yes, I remember that. And so I went out there, and Perry invited me to his home after for dinner. And I had never met people like Perry and Julie. And I'll just give you one example. This is my favorite story about them. This is when I fell in love with them. When they moved to that area, they didn't like the school district, they didn't like the program, and they had three young daughters, and so they built their own school. So, right? You started like your own school and I don't remember what age group was. It was that, just a primary, like kindergarten through sixth grade? I can't remember.

Dr. Perry Gee:
It was through K through sixth grade. It was a charter school. We had incredible teachers that really led the work, and Julie and I just facilitated it. It was wonderful. It made a big difference.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
When I found out that they saw a problem, there was an issue, and they took action and, like I said, created their own school, of course, with a lot of help. Like, these are my kind of people who don't just sit around complaining about it, they actually do something about it. And they've really been in this. And he and Julie have been in this academic space, because you're also adjunct assistant professor at the University of Utah. Perry is also a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and the Western Academy of Nurses. And I lost count. Perry, how many articles have you published?

Dr. Perry Gee:
Well, I'd like to publish more, but maybe in the 30s, Renee. Now, part of it is my job as a nurse scientist, so the expectation is I do publish and I love doing that.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
You do. And that's why I love to surround myself with people who are in some ways different from me. So we have, I think, the same core values as a human being, but I am actually not a great writer, and I am even like scholarly writing is probably one of my weaker skills. And so when I live vicariously through people like Perry, who are amazing writers, and the research that you do at Intermountain Health and even before that is just really impressive. So, thank you for all of your great work.

Dr. Perry Gee:
Thanks for saying that, Renee. And I should disclose something here. And that is, it did not come naturally to me to write at all. As a matter of fact, I was a terrible writer as an undergrad student. Oh, I was horrible in high school. I was like the worst. And as an undergrad, I just barely made it through, and it wasn't until I got to graduate school and I started writing as a nurse, and my faculty were like, oh, my papers were just nothing but read. And so the reason I bring this up is that even in a person like me who was older, I was 15 years into my career, and I learned how to do it. I learned how to write. All of us can do that. And sometimes, when I work with nurses, that's one of their biggest fears. Is writing and writing an abstract or a manuscript. And I just tell them, we can do this. If we all work together, we'll help each other along. I learned something new about writing every single day.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Wow. I had no idea. I just assumed people were naturally gifted at writing or speaking, so I am so comfortable in front of an audience. I will speak to thousands of people now. I always get a little bit nervous before I start, but once I start, I am good. I will stand there forever. So that's my superpower. But writing, oh, I have to, like, clear everything off my calendar, sit down, have my coffee, no noise and focus because it just doesn't come naturally to me. So, Perry, you've given me a little bit of hope that if I continue just writing, and I think it's a limiting belief that a lot of us nurses have that we can't do fill in the blank. But if you look at all of us, there's always a first time that we did something, and it never looked great. The first time I stood in front of an audience, I thought I was breaking out in hives because I was so nervous. Okay. And then you just work at it, and you get better and better. We were talking actually a little bit, and before we hit record about this podcast, I was a nervous wreck. The first couple of times I hit record interviewing people on my podcast, but then you just work at it and you get better and you get better, and I'm still working at it. And so thank you for that, Perry. Maybe I will become a great writer like you someday, just with a little bit of practice and a little bit of help.

Dr. Perry Gee:
Thank you. Renee. And you know, the, I know this isn't necessarily our topic today, but I think these are important messages for nurses to hear. I wasn't a good speaker at all. As a matter of fact, when I started speaking, I first started in church, and our priest asked me, Hey Perry, would you read Scripture? And I was terrified. I did not want to read. The one thing I hated was reading in front of other people because I can't pronounce. I was just terrible. And so here I am, this PhD, and I can't pronounce things or read or spell. And so I had to work at it, just like you said. So I would take this scripture home, and I would read it and study it so that I could then, with comfort, present the work that really has translated into everything I've done as an academic over the years. I practice stuff I encouraged nurses that I work with to practice so that they feel comfortable because people are there to hear them. Like, when I listen to you, Renee, I'm there to hear you. And if they are so worried about how they're presenting or their content, they may not be able to get to that point. Now, I'm at the point in my career where it doesn't bother me anymore. I don't really even have to practice a whole lot unless it's something new, but, and that is all part of, by the way, this is all part of the well-being work that we do. Learning how to take control of our practice. One of the things that happens that impacts our well-being, and in this model that I've developed over the years related to nurse resilience, one of the main factors, I think, is control over your practice. In fact, I just read an article about it this morning. How can I get more control over my practice? One of the things that always impressed me about you, Renee, was your work in helping people learn to be certified as med surg nurses, and in that process, they're taking more control over their practice. Research shows that nurses who have certifications have better well-being, and it's because they have more control over their practice and their destiny.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
I never thought about it from that perspective. And so, those of you who are listening, I used to teach classes to help med surg nurses become certified. And I will tell you, I had to give that up because the work that I was doing around bullying and incivility was growing so much that you can't chase two rabbits. It was so hard for me to give that up because I loved it so much. But the work that I am doing in the bullying and incivility world was, I was one of the only people doing this work the way I'm doing it. Okay, there's other people in this space, but med-surg certification, there are lots and lots of people who are helping them. But I never looked at it from that perspective that it's giving those nurses. It's part of their well-being and a sense of control over their practice. And I want to really talk about this well-being. You mentioned resilience. I definitely want to talk about that, but I want to start by really talking about the term burnout. We hear that term, and I even mentioned it when I mentioned the McKinsey report. It's almost like this blanket term that we use that can mean different things to different people. So, is that the right word we should be using? Should we be using something different?

Dr. Perry Gee:
I'm so glad you bring it up. And the word burnout can be frightening to some and it can be irritating to some. I was in a meeting with a group of academic nurses just yesterday from all over the United States, and in that meaning, the term burnout came up, and one of the people in the meeting said, I don't ever want to hear that word again, and, but we all know that it's an actual construct that's been studied for decades now. And it's really, you know, I look at Christina Maslach's work in this space, and her work really identified three major areas of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficiency. And it makes sense when you think about it, really, the hallmark of burnout is physical and emotional exhaustion. So, I'm physically and emotionally exhausted, and we all know this without being nurses. When you're tired, or you're hangry, or whatever those things are, you're less civil. You're sometimes considered grouchy. My kids will tease me about that. And in with burnout. The other hallmark is this cynicism that people get. Well, I think part of it is just because they're exhausted. And then third, if you're tired and you're cynical, then you're going to be inefficient in your work. And so all those things go together. And that's how Dr. Maslach described burnout. And that's how we measure burnout as those three constructs over the years. If you want to measure burnout as one item, you could just measure whether or not people are exhausted. So, that term is used a lot. But I'm afraid that lately, that term has been used for everything. Oh, these people are burnout, but are they really burned out? Maybe they have moral distress related to their job. Maybe they're not exhausted. Remember, burnout is a workplace condition. If we weren't working, most of us wouldn't be burned out. Burnout at a workplace condition. And it's not a mental condition. It's not a mental health condition. It's not in the DSM. It is a workplace condition and we create hard things for nurses. They impact burnout. One of the hardest things we created for them was the electronic health record. By the way, I'm an informaticist by training, and I've spent 20 years developing, designing, and working on electronic health records. I know that the work that I did led to people being burned out.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Yeah. So, oh, gosh. You mentioned a lot of things, and I want to unpack a couple of them. I love this whole concept of burnout. We use that term, but is it really burnout, or is it something else? And I think, and I'd like your input on this. People just don't know the difference. I didn't know the constructs. I didn't understand the burnout. It was three parts exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficiency. And when we look at, I know we're going to talk a little bit later about, all right, what can we do about this? There's this whole concept of being able to disconnect. Completely disconnect. But I think today in our busy, busy world, it's so hard for people to completely disconnect from their work because there's so much work to do. They don't think there's time to disconnect. But really, when you're going nonstop from sun up to sun down, you become so inefficient that if we would just pause, disconnect, then actually we can get more done. And so are you seeing that where, because of our limited resources, the higher demands placed on nurses that work in this hamster wheel cycle of not being able to actually pause, take a break, take care of ourselves? And so all of that is leading. Like I said, I'm really focused on that inefficiency because if you look at the work of a nurse, the work of a nurse manager, a director, I often think that there's some, and please forgive me for saying this, I'm saying it, but I don't really mean it this way, is that there's a lot of waste of time. They're spending a lot of time doing things that either they shouldn't be doing it, they're doing rework because there's just this inefficiency. And I think it's coming from all the things that you just mentioned. So I don't know if anything that I just said made sense, but I'm percolating right now with what you just said.

Dr. Perry Gee:
Well, I wasn't even going to talk about this today, Renee, but something that you said really made me think about this disconnection, and we've been talking about the ability to disconnect. And I don't know that this has been carefully studied over the last several years. And let me try to put all this together. So first, many of us, since the pandemic, have not been disconnected. There's this increase in incivility, not only among nurses but also among the general population since the pandemic. We see it in workplace violence on a daily basis. The reports I hear every single day I work for a company that covers six states. We have 33 hospitals, about 18,000 nurses, and we've had an uptick in in workplace violence since the pandemic. I wonder if it has something to do with this inability to disconnect. Second, when I'm around, and I happen to be in Colorado this week, rounding at our hospitals in the Denver area, and they're just absolutely fantastic. But when I round, there's something different than when I was a nurse. And that is everybody has a cell phone with them at all times, right? So when I worked as a staff nurse for 12 hours, I was disconnected from home for 12 hours, completely disconnected most of the time. And by the way, I was also disconnected from the news and what was happening in the world. By the way, my work was still hard. I was still burned out at times. We got incivil at times, all the things that happened, but I didn't have the added stressors of my daughters at home, worrying about them, worrying about what's going on in the news. Oh, here's a car accident. Oh, here's an Amber alert. Whatever those things were, we have a different level of engagement now as nurses over the last ten years, and I don't know how to explain that and how that impacts our daily well-being in our daily burnout. So, Renee, I'm glad you brought that inability to disconnect because I think we were thinking the other way, right? Inability to disconnect from work, by the way, that's a whole other topic we could talk about because we were sent home. So, in my company, we sent home during the pandemic 6000 Workers to work from home. Most of them are still working from home. A lot of them are nurses, and those nurses all tell me. Most of them tell me I work more hours now than I ever did. I'm working seven days a week now. I might be a manager or a case manager or somebody who works from home, you know, not a nurse that typically works in the hospital. But I'm not able to disconnect. And I can tell you from a personal, I'm on seven days a week, and I'm sure that's true for a lot of people. Listen to this seven days a week. One way or the other, I'm on. I see stuff. I get questions from people my boss is on. I see her out there. It can't be very good for us. I don't practice what I preach sometimes, so this ability to disconnect, Renee, I think, is impacting burnout and well-being.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
I do, too. Perry and I look at the nurses and the leaders who are out there who are always tethered to their phone. The leader who goes home and right away is still getting text messages from their staff or on the weekends. And actually, we've been looking into this. We do a live culture call every month with a group of leaders that are in some of our programs, and it was all about setting boundaries as a leader and not letting people hijack your time because it's becoming a problem. And we've been asking the question, how many of you are answering, not checking, answering text messages from your staff on the weekends or when you're not at work? And I think right now we're at 92% who said, yes, they are. And these are not urgent issues. These are hey, six months from now I want to have this day off. Is that okay? And how do we help, especially our leaders completely disconnect when they go home. Now, I remember when I was a frontline manager. This was back in the day when our employee performance reviews were on paper, so the only way that I could get those done was to bring them all home with me. And I would sit there at my kitchen table in the mornings, on the weekends, and I would spend sometimes a couple of hours when my kids were playing, and I could have been doing other things and getting that work done, and also answering the calls from my staff at all hours of the day and night. We need to do a better job. Not only I look at it at the system level, what can we do at the organizational or system level to say this is not okay? We need you to have some disconnected time at least start with when you go home. Like you can get bombarded all day long, but when you cross the threshold of your home space, you should have some protected time from work and on the weekends and on holidays. So, they need to create that and reinforce that. But then, as an individual, you mentioned having control over your practice. We are really the only ones who truly have control over what we do with our time. So when I ask leaders well, when they text you, do you answer them? Yes. Okay. Well, let's start there. Let's start by saying, if you text me, I am not going to answer you until I come back to work, okay? And just, I think we have to be more thoughtful about it, because if not, it's going to lead to exhaustion and cynicism and inefficiencies, and we're already seeing that right now.

Dr. Perry Gee:
Yeah, Renee, you couldn't be more right. And I think we as leaders need to be role modeling that we as preceptors need to be role modeling that to our new nurses that are coming into the field. And I don't know that we are we but we talk about it. So, every six months or so, we talk about it. We work on improving that, and then it drifts back to this norm, and I see that frequently, or we'll even have a campaign. Hey, unplug when you get home. But then we drift back into answering the calls on weekends. This Sunday morning, I texted a colleague about a work issue this last Sunday morning about a work issue, and I know that this colleague really values her Sundays and her time at church, and I apologized upfront, but that wasn't enough because she still answered me. And we had a conversation, and I actually said, oh, please tell your, I don't even know her husband. I said, please apologize to your husband. I feel really bad about asking you these questions. I shouldn't have done that. And I know that now she and I are friends and we're equal colleagues. And she didn't seem to mind. But maybe she did mind, you don't know, in a text message. And so this is something we're going to have to lead out on and role model starting with me. By the way, Renee, I need to start doing that, and I need to encourage my leader to do that, too, because I'm watching her work very hard in the background seven days a week. And I care about her, and I need her to lead us. And so I certainly don't want her to be doing that well.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
And we all do it, and we don't realize we're doing it until somebody reminds us that we're like, you're texting your colleague on a Sunday, okay? Even though she values her Sundays because she goes to church. I was in a very similar situation where and it's really funny. It's embarrassing to admit this, but fillet myself open in front of many audiences because it's the truth. I never claim to be perfect. I'm always working on something. Well, I used to claim I've never taken a day off since I started this company. I work holidays, I work vacations, and blah blah blah. Like, what is wrong with me? Okay, for bragging about being so busy that I work every day. And what was happening was I would tell my team, look, you're going to get emails from me on Saturday. On Sundays, I don't expect you to answer them. Just don't even look until Monday. But here's what was happening. I started getting replies back from my team on the weekends, and I mentioned it to somebody who we were working with, and she says, well, every time I get an email, it dings, and my computer is always on. And so I just look, and if I'm not busy, I'll go ahead and answer it. And I thought, shame on me. I'm telling my team, I want you to unplug. And here's me sending them emails, but telling them, oh, you don't have to answer them until Monday. So, I stopped doing that. So, I don't email my team on the weekend. Now, if I choose to work on Saturday, I'm really taking Sundays off. Now. If I choose to work on Saturdays, I just schedule them to go out Monday morning. So now they laugh. Oh, Renee was working this weekend. I got 27 emails from her Monday morning at 6 a.m. Okay, but at least it's a start. It's a start to respect my team's time when they're off; even if they're off during the week, I will schedule those emails to go out when they're back so they're not tempted because people I think, in general, they want to please their boss, they want to be a good employee, and so I'm going to be responsive. But yeah, we have to role model, as you said, Perry, role model the behaviors that we really want to see. And when we mess up or we do something like you texting your colleague or me slipping an email in on a Saturday, we need to say time out; I apologize. I should have waited.

Dr. Perry Gee:
Yes, our work environment is too complicated for us to make it even worse. I have been working with the folks from Vizient, and they have, and we developed a survey for nurse executives about their well-being. How are they? What are they doing for their own well-being? And do they feel like they have enough support for well-being? And overwhelmingly, we found, number one, they're burned out. They might even have less resources than we nurses that work closer to the point of care have because the buck stops with them or does stop with them. They may not have people to reach out to. They can't tell anybody. I'm anxious, or afraid, or scared, and they have to be on call 24/7. So as we did that work, we also realized it goes to the rest of the C-suite as well. So our operating officers and our chief medical officers and others and people think, well, hey, they're high paid. It doesn't matter. But it does matter. We all know how important leadership is for our organizations and for our teams, and so we really need to be watching out for them as well. So we're going to continue to do work looking at the C-suite and how people are doing in their well-being and what they do for things. By the way, they've been exposed to all of our well-being strategies, but do they actually use them themselves? And by the way, most of them are pretty good at it, of taking care of themselves because otherwise, they wouldn't have survived and made it into this leadership level if they weren't. So, I don't want to forget our leaders. And by the way, for any of us nurses, it's okay for us to ask our leaders, are you doing okay? We can ask our chief nurse, are you doing okay? You know, when a major horrific event happens at one of our facilities, we all huddle together. But the chief nurse many times and not, or maybe the director of that department takes on the secondary trauma from all of that. And not only are they worried about the entire team, but they're also worried about the patients, and families, and communities that were impacted by that terrible event. And so it's okay for us to check in up instead of always checking in down. We can check in up and make sure the people above us are doing okay as well.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
It's a really great point. I, from, you had mentioned Vizient taking a look at the executive roll. I think they've been overlooked in all of this. When we looked at what happened after the pandemic and it was the staff nurse, and now it's the frontline managers because looking at their span of responsibilities and how turnover among our nurse managers is so high right now, and a lot of the data that we collect shows that almost 50% of our new nurse leaders have basically less than two years experience. And we're asking them to lead very complicated teams, but we're really not looking at that executive level. And I love just the simple asking your boss, are you okay? How are you? There's been a lot of difficulties over the last week or two. I wanted to check in with you to make sure you were okay. I don't know why we think that they should always be okay, or we think I don't know what it is like. I don't want to bother them by asking them, but oh my God, for somebody to actually reach out and say, I was thinking about you, this must be really difficult. Are you okay? Is powerful. Very powerful. All right. We've talked about a lot of things. I have to bring this up. This will probably be the last focus, but I think I see a part two in our future. Can we talk about the word resilience? Because it's almost becoming taboo. We're not allowed to say that word. It's just like me. My favorite keynote that I gave every year for Nurses Week. I have a book on this. I love, love, loved it, and I'm no longer offering it because it was. The title was Celebrate Nursing: Human by Birth, Hero by Choice. While nurses hate that word because of the pandemic, I think resilience is becoming the same hate word. So, Perry, can you talk about this a little bit because you are the expert?

Dr. Perry Gee:
I would love to talk about resilience. And yes, by the way, in that same conversation yesterday when we talked about burnout, the other thing they said was, I don't want to hear resilience anymore, and I hear that all over the place. And at the same time, I know from the science now I'm putting on my research hat. I know from the science that resilience is important. It's still important for us, and it's still important. And by the way, when I say resilience, I'm really talking about personal resilience. It's still important for us to be looking out for one another and to look out for ourselves. And there are some really simple things that we can always do to maintain our own resilience. So, really, I mentioned that model, the model that my team and I worked on several years ago for resilience had to do with with control of your practice. So that was the very first thing. People who have more control over their practice are typically more resilient people who have more connections with others or more. And by the way, those connections don't have to be always another nurse. Maybe it's your neighbor, maybe it's connections at church or with friends, maybe your connection with the security guard or somebody who works in the kitchen. It doesn't have to always be another colleague. And then the third pillar, I think, is purpose as that sense of purpose. Too often, nurses have felt like I just don't even know what my purpose is anymore. What is my purpose? All I feel like I do is chart or run for things like you were talking about. Wait, we could have a whole episode, Renee, talking about waste in healthcare waste in our workflow. And all of those things impact our sense of purpose. So, what can you do as a leader to help nurture the sense of purpose in a nurse? And what can I do as the nurse to keep my purpose going? So for me personally, I get I have the opportunity to do some medical mission work in other countries, that I go there for one week and I am charged with purpose for like two years. I just feel great about things, and it's hard work. It's almost never super fun. It's just hard. Sometimes it's heartbreaking, especially depending on the country that you go to. But all of a sudden I feel like, well, I have purpose. Again, it's not about me checking boxes or whatever it is, it's I'm making the difference in people's lives, and that is what most of us came into nursing for. So those are the areas to nurture the connections with others. Our purpose, our control of our practice will really help us build that resilience, and resilience helps us combat all of the other issues that we might be facing, Renee. So burnout, compassion fatigue, moral distress, secondary trauma, all those things. The resilience will help us with that. So I don't want us to forget that. By the way, I don't ever want us to be in a place where we say, well, if this nurse is more resilient than they, they wouldn't have burned out. Or if there's just more nurses, more resilient, she wouldn't have made that error. I never want us to be there.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Thank you for that.

Dr. Perry Gee:
I want us to know that we all have different degrees of resilience. And by the way, I'm more resilient some days than I am other days. It just depends, because we have that interplay of anxiety and stress in our lives that interplays with all of that. So, focus on your own personal well-being, which will help build your resilience. Even just the Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation program at the ANA has really good resources for self-care. And then this, by the way, the cool thing about self-care is it doesn't really cost anything.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Yeah, it's free. A lot of it is free.

Dr. Perry Gee:
Taking three deep breaths, being mindful, spending time in nature, focus on gratitude. All of those things are free, and they're all evidence-based, which is the really exciting thing for me.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Yeah. So, I so appreciate this model. Control your practice, connections with others, and purpose. It reminds me of something I read from Daniel Pink. He wrote a book called Drive and it was all about motivation. And he basically said, first of all, you can't motivate anyone. Okay. It's self-motivation. Very similar, I think, to resilience. It's self resilience. But he said there are three pillars. They have to have a sense of purpose. Okay. They have to have autonomy. And I think that goes to your control of your practice. And then mastery is the one that's a little different than yours is connected connectedness with others or connections with others. But I think it goes back to all human beings can handle, and I'm just going to say hard things. It's the term I, my daughter's using now with our six-year-old. She's like, Olivia, you can do hard things, okay? I don't know if it's part of the gentle parenting, but she. This is hard. But I know you can do it. So we can do this, and we can handle almost anything that is thrown our way. If we do have that sense of purpose, if we know why we're on this earth, and it's so important for nurses to find a way to connect with their purpose, you go to a medical mission, even if it's a nurse who maybe doesn't have that opportunity, who connects, finds a way to connect with one patient each time they work. And that was what I always did. There was always that one patient that I felt I gave them something that they could take home with them that was going to help make their lives better. Okay. I remember the one time sitting there with a patient, and the patient and his wife, okay, was there, and we were talking about, okay, reducing his alcohol intake. And she, I said, okay, how much do you drink? He says he has like one Manhattan a day. And I'm like, okay, well, that's a bit much one. And I said, well then I thought, wait a minute, how big is the glass that you drink your Manhattan? It was like a tumbler. And what we realized was he had three servings of alcohol in that one Manhattan every day. So I said to him, how about like I've worked with him? First of all, it was like, okay, knowledge. Oh my gosh, this is how much I'm drinking. And I said, can you cut it back to a small glass? A day and I sat there, and it was the alcohol, and there were a couple of other things. But when I left that room, as I was leaving, the wife said, I cannot thank you enough. Nobody has actually sat down and asked these questions. We have no idea. Do you think, how did you realize a tumbler of a Manhattan isn't good for you? But hey, no judgment here. I felt really good about being a nurse, about having that opportunity to help that patient. Now, whether he listened to me or went back to the tumbler, I don't know. But, and purpose can be a small thing like that. Or it could be something big, like going on a medical mission and seeing the impact, the positive impact you have on people who are. So they have an unfortunate situation. It doesn't matter. Your purpose is yours. But then that piece of connection with other people, whether it's the people that you work with, it's the people in your community, it's your friends, it's your family. But be very intentional about making those connections so that you can step away from work for a period of time and just be with other human beings is equally as important. And so, Perry, okay, we definitely have to have a part two. But as we wrap up this part one, if you have a new nurse, an experienced nurse, a nurse manager, executive listening to this, who this conversation really resonates with them, and they want to do something to reduce their burnout and to become more resilient. I don't know; what would you recommend is maybe a first step for them?

Dr. Perry Gee:
Well, finding more information, I think, would be super helpful. And like I mentioned, Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation. The American Nurses Foundation, which is also part of the ANA, is launching a training program that's free for any nurse in the country. You don't have to be an ANA member for Stress First Aid, which came from the Center for PTSD studies, and it will help you just learn the importance of just two things, two things, and that is really checking on one another and then coordinating help for one another. So maybe you check on the nurse that you're working with. Just check in with them. How are things going today? And if you find that people are struggling, here are some resources for you that we have right here at work. We've got EAP at work. We've got this program at work, whatever. Check on each other, I think, is the most important thing that we could do right now. And again, that costs nothing. And and it helps develop that connection with each other. It would be easier to walk away from it, right, to do your work and go home. But check on a peer, check on a friend, even check on somebody who doesn't work in your department just to make sure that they're doing okay.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
I think this is a really great first step. There are resources out there. Learn more about this. As we have shared, you have done a wonderful job sharing some of these models and really helping us to understand where this is coming from. So that information is out there. And in the show notes, we'll put the link to the Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation. We'll put that in there. We'll also take a look at the American Nurse Foundation and put a link there. Perry, is it okay that we add your LinkedIn profile to the show notes in case somebody wants to connect with you?

Dr. Perry Gee:
Yeah, I would love that. I love talking to people about well-being, about nurse well-being and all areas of it, the good and the bad. So, happy to.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Thank you for that. And I know you've always been very generous with your time. And I think the bottom line in all of this is, don't just sit back and let it happen like there are things that you can do. And I always even ask myself, despite our busy lives, what can I do today to find a way to take care of myself today? And as you said, I've been learning a lot about the different types of deep breathing the four, seven, eight, the box breathing. And I'll tell you what, it has made a difference for me in my quality of sleep, how I'm handling stressful situations. And so that's just, and as you said, it's free. Breathing is free. Okay. If they ever start charging for breathing, I'm out of this world. Okay, like I'm done. But right now, it's free. And Perry, I just I can't thank you enough for first of all the good work that you're doing in this space, because people who work in healthcare, and I know we're nurses, but it's our physicians and our providers and our respiratory and our support staff. It's all of us who are dealing with this, the work that you're doing, the research that you're doing, and the American Nurses Association and the work that you're doing with Vizient is so incredibly important. So I want to thank you for that. I want to thank you for being a guest on our podcast today and thank you for being my good friend too.

Dr. Perry Gee:
So good to see you, Renee. I wish I was seeing you more often.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
I know we used to run into each other when we were traveling. I'm in, like, California, and I'm posting on LinkedIn and or Facebook, and I'm like, wait, where are you? I'm here, too. And then we get together. But we haven't run into each other in a while. So I have to give you my travel schedule, and you can, if we're going to, our paths might cross, but I want to thank you again for being here, Perry. And I want to thank all of you who are listening right now or watching right now. Thank you for being here. We know you're really busy, but if you're here, it's because you recognize the importance of cultivating a healthy work culture. And so thank you for being here. And if you like this episode you like this podcast, please review it, rate it, and share it with someone who may need to hear this today. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you soon.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Thank you for listening to Coffee Break: Breaking the Cycle of Bullying in Healthcare – One Cup at a Time. If you found this podcast helpful, we invite you to click the subscribe button and tune in every week. For more information about our show and how we work with healthcare organizations to cultivate and sustain a healthy work culture free from bullying and incivility, visit us at HealthyWorkforceInstitute.com. Until our next cup of coffee, be kind, take care, and stay connected.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you’d love including secure transcription and file storage, upload many different filetypes, powerful integrations and APIs, enterprise-grade admin tools, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.