The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives

by Theresa Brown

Home is a vaccine against the stresses of nursing.

Hospital administrators with their eyes on the bottom line seem to think that nurses can stretch infinitely, like rubber bands.

I say, put the patient at the center and figure out the money from there.

We need a menu that includes the option: spent time comforting patient with life-threatening diagnosis. But nothing that empathy-intense gets included in our required paperwork.

I wish we could occasionally slow down, but the pace won’t change unless caring becomes as lucrative for hospitals as tests and procedures.

The basics of life seem ordinary only if you’ve never faced losing them.