Managing Oncology Nurse Burnout Through Peer Support, Emotional Intelligence

Having a network of support from peers is a way to prevent burnout for oncology nurses and advanced practice providers (APPs) who frequently deal with losses of patients, according to an experienced oncology nurse.

Pattie Jakel, MN, RN, AOCN, spoke with Oncology Nursing News® about burnout in oncology nursing and ways to avoid it while providing palliative care to patients. According to Jakel, debriefing with colleagues and friends in the same line of work can help ease the burden of frequent loss associated with oncology nursing. Likewise, having hobbies outside of work can have a similar effect.

She also mentioned that supporting patients in ways other than medical guidance as patients near the end of life can be beneficial. Jakel added that the 3 Wishes program at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was established for this reason and not only helped patients achieve their final wishes, but reduced burnout for nurses.

Jakel is an editor in chief for Oncology Nursing News®.

Transcript

You have to have a strong network and support. And my husband is…an architect, so medicine is not his thing, and in the beginning, he’d be like, “Pattie, I can only hear one sad story a week because I can’t hear all your sad stories.”

It made me realize…where would he take it? To the job site and talk to the foreman about it? No, he needed to be able to take it somewhere also. So I realized I needed to use people in the same kind of roles, like my colleagues, my friends, anybody that was in nursing. And I think that’s really helpful.

I think debriefings—again, working in acute care, I saw some horrific death and dying that occurred for our patients. So we would definitely debrief afterwards, bring the group together 5 minutes. Sometimes we did longer ones.

We had a program at UCLA started by our medical ICU physician, and we picked up and ran with it. We were kind of doing it before the program started, but it was something called 3 Wishes.

So when one of our patients was going to die and we had had a conversation, we would say, “What is it that you would like right now?” There was a young [patient with testicular cancer], and his daughter was 6 [years old], and he said, “I wanted to take her to the snow.”

And because we’re in LA, we don’t have any snow. He wanted to take her to the mountains. And I said, “You can’t go. You’re on high flow. You’ve got chest tubes. You’re not going to be able to take her.”

So we brought snow to our garden. We had a snow day, and it was amazing and healing. And he got his wish with his child.

And there were other ramifications, like all the [pediatric unit] kids came down to play in the snow. It was 80° in Santa Monica in December, but we would do things like that, like have an anniversary party. We had so many weddings. I lost count of the number of weddings that we would have.

I think that helps us heal. And the data on the 3 Wishes program showed that the nurses had less stress and less burnout, but it’s still hard. You have to take care of yourself. You have to have a hobby or something that brings you pleasure and satisfaction. [For] lots of my nurses, it was running or biking or baking. I’d be like, “Well, bring the baked goods in, please!”

You have to look inside, and you have to build your emotional intelligence about it.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.