Expert: Options available for nurses with burnout - but want to stay in healthcare

FOX 2 - The toll on many of us from the pandemic has been hard - and it has hit the nursing profession even moreso, with burnout and stress impacting their ranks  

Kimberly Snowdon, a nurse practitioner and Chief of medical services for Oakland County spoke to FOX 2 about it, and says many nurses have really hit a wall and are preparing to leave, or have left, the field.

"Nurses are at a pivotal point where we have a great deal of nurses retiring from the profession," she said. "We have several nurses, all over the country right now, that are at a point of burnout. They are ready to either change professions, or to go ahead and just call it quits a little bit early - because the pandemic really has burned them out."

FOX 2: "If they are going to remain in the field but are not happy what’s the first step?"

"They contact the leadership at the hospital system or wherever they working and say look, this is the change that we want now, this is how we want to make it better for our patients, this is that we want to make it better for our profession," Snowdon said. "Someone eventually will listen. I was in that spot, quite a few years ago, and I kept going into somebody listened to me."

FOX 2: "What else can nurses do with their skills if they want to stay in healthcare?"

"The neat thing with nursing is, there is always a specialty area," Snowdon said. "So for example, nurses that want to work in labor and delivery, there is a specialty for that. nurses that want to help patients that do wound care, there’s a specialty certification for that. Nurses that want to do home care, there is a specialty for that.

"So it’s beyond their four year of nursing school, it’s an additional year or two and many times your employer will pay for you to get the certifications."