By Denny Watkins
June 14, 2024 | VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2
The worst day of Amanda White’s nursing career came in June 2020, shortly after the first devastating peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Death rates had been on the decline in the last 2 months, but around 800 people were still dying daily from COVID in the United States. Dozens of patients were coming through the ICU each month at UPMC Memorial Hospital, where White had worked since 2017.
“Out of everyone that came to us, like 90% of them died,” White said. “Every day, I knew I was going to have to see a lot of people die.”
In the ICU, White attended to patients with COVID on respirators to help their breathing as their lungs grew inflamed and filled with fluid. Before coming into each room, White routinely donned a full surgical gown and gloves. The N95 filtration mask she wore was such a precious commodity that she used the same one every day for weeks. The hospital would collect them, clean the dirty masks, and redistribute them. At one point, White recalled, hospital administration sent an email asking women not to wear makeup to work because it made cleaning the masks more difficult.
On this particular day, White was walking through the ICU corridor when she noticed a patient with COVID rousing from sedation and pulling on her breathing tube, separating the plastic piece connecting the tube to the ventilator.
As White pulled on her personal protective equipment, she remembered thinking the patient would likely suffocate before she could get into the room. But if she walked in unprotected, she would expose herself to an active case of COVID, which meant, at best, a 2-week quarantine afterward and risk of infection.
The nurse decided to step in without protective equipment, reinsert the breathing tube, and help put the patient back under sedation. White had just returned to the ICU after 8 weeks of maternity leave following a cesarean delivery. She knew the consequences of her decision.
“Then I went outside, and I called my husband from the parking lot,” White said. She told her husband, who is a nurse in a long-term care facility, that she’d have to swap houses with her father-in-law for the next 2 weeks to quarantine while the two men cared for her 2-month-old son.
She also made a decision about the future of her career as an intensive care nurse. “That was the day I decided to get out.”
Running on empty
White is far from the only health care professional to transition to a lower-stress career path in recent years. A 2023 survey by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing estimated that roughly 100,000 nurses have quit the profession since 2021, with another 610,388 nurses planning to leave because of stress, burnout, or retirement by 2027.
According to a study conducted in 2020 by the American Medical Association, nearly one in four physicians planned to leave their practice within the next 2 years.