I have been in hospice a little over 6 years. I have held just about every position an RN can have. I started in case management, but I have also been an admissions nurse and have performed hundreds of admissions. I have hundreds of hours on-call both evenings and weekends. I have several years of clinical director experience and have held the position of administrator. I am currently a clinical team leader in the Kansas City area.

I have witnessed many great nurses burn out and give up on this work. In this series, I hope to present many ways in which this can be avoided. Today, I will start with the most basic skill needed to avoid suffering from burnout.

Be Intentional

For this series, I (currently) have 12 different things we can do to help protect ourselves from burnout. They all require intentionality. Each of these items require more than just a desire to not be burned out. None of us magically survived nursing school. We had to be intentional every single day. We got up at a specific time. We knew our schedules, and we took them seriously. In the same way, we won’t magically avoid burn out.

I tell my nurses, “Your day doesn’t happen to you. You happen to your day.” Yes, there will be surprises, but we can’t be surprised all day long. Much of our day is predictable. We shouldn’t be spending most of our day saying to ourselves, “Wow, I never thought that could happen.”

Abraham Lincoln once said, “You can have anything you want, if you want it badly enough.” I’ll ask you now, “How badly do you want this? How badly do you want to stay with hospice? How badly do you want to avoid burnout? Your level of intentionality is the answer to this question. How purposeful you are willing to be is how successful you will be.

The concept of intentionality will be woven into every article I write on this subject. It is the foundation required to pull this off. Many of these concepts may seem impossible or at least too difficult to really pull off. They may be foreign to you, or something you have been told to do many times, and you have not been able to do them. If you are someone who naturally focuses on how something can’t be done, none of this will be of benefit to you. If you are willing to push yourself beyond where you are now, you can do this.

There are two kinds of burnout in hospice. There is work burnout and organizational burnout. You can love your company, but be exhausted with hospice. Your days are crazy. You can’t get your charting done. Your patients are high acuity. Your caseload is too high. You do love the company you work for, they treat you well and you like your leadership.

How will you be able to tell the difference? As you work your way through all of my posts, you should be able to identify whether it is your company or your bad habits causing the burnout. For an example; If I’m talking about time management, and you are trying to carry a caseload of 25 patients, it’s pretty clear that you are suffering from organizational burnout. They have put you in a place where failure is the only likely result. Even if you have an LPN/LVN at your side, this is a no-win scenario. I will try to address this with each article. I’ll help you decide if the problem is the company or your habits.

In closing, these articles are time tested. I was trained this way when I started working in hospice. These concepts have helped me avoid burnout. Right now, hospice is as challenging for me as it has ever been. I’m as busy as I have ever been, but I’m also as happy as I’ve ever been.

Will you take this journey of discovery with me? Will you allow me to invest in you? Are you willing to wipe the slate clean and engage these articles with a new sense of wonder for this work? It is so important for you to stay in hospice. Your patients and their families need you. The hospice community needs you. Your neighbors, friends and city need you. You can do it, and I want to help you get there.

Visit The Hospice Nursing Community for more assistance in avoiding hospice burnout.

James

James worked on-and-off as an LPN for over 20 years. In 2014 he completed a bridge program and became an RN. James became a hospice nurse in January 2015. He lives in the Kansas City area with his wife of over 30 years, 4 daughters and 2 sons in law.