Healing Nurse Trauma Podcast #29: The C-Suite Prioritizes Technology over Nurses

In the briefest of refreshers, we’re all trained and know how to manage vicarious or secondary trauma and trauma from disasters.  What is literally driving nurses and other health professionals from their roles is the avoidable trauma exposures in the form of historical trauma (e.g., nurses eating their young), workplace violence (e.g., physical, verbal, gaslighting, bullying, hazing, incivilities), system-induced trauma (e.g., a nurse reports being assaulted by a patient and is asked “what could you have done differently?”), insufficient resource trauma (e.g., dangerous staffing ratios, being floated to a unit outside of your clinical specialty), and second-victim trauma secondary to system or organizational inadequacies (carrying the burden of shame or guilt after a near miss, adverse or sentinel event that is secondary to system shortcomings).

All of THIS is what’s missing from the NEJM report and Optum survey.  Rest assured, I will be speaking to these important topics when I’m in session at the round table.

Partnering for solutions… AKA Outsourcing

At least 72% of c-suite leaders say outsourcing certain functions is super important.  Think supply chain management, revenue cycle management, IT, coding, etc.  The typical outsourcing that, while helpful, also contributes to the degree of fragmentation within any system.  Included in “partnering for solutions” conversations are AI-driven technologies to support health professionals, virtual health, etc.   And then there’s the elephant(s) in the room, what is the role of technology in tackling the workforce staffing crisis?

Prioritizing technology-driven solutions over employee safety and professional wellbeing

Automation is being prioritized by over 61% of the leaders surveyed. Workflow automations, assisted technologies, and other automations that are used to enhance human capabilities.  Finding that sweet spot where technologies optimize processes, reduce administrative burdens, and frees up health care professionals to do what they do best – care for their patients.  Other solutions include adding another layer of management (!) to help integrate technologies into workflow and study how processes and outcomes are optimized.  

In light of these tech-driven solutions, we must be ever mindful of the fact that each of us, the patient, their family members, the nurse, the provider, the health professionals . . .each of us are whole human beings who are so much more than the sum of our parts.  We are inseparable from the contexts and systems within which we live and work.  

Rather than taking three steps back to see where more holistic and integrative approaches can be taken to the staffing crisis, leaders are doubling down on the reductionistic, mechanistic, and technologically driven approach rather than partnering with the human physiology of its employees and the ancient wisdom of the autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve.  Health professionals are whole human beings, with their own individual and occupational-related trauma histories.

Instead of outsourcing, partnering, and adding more layers of infrastructure and bureaucratic burden on already overworked, unsafe, traumatized employees, why not start with the primal need for safety?  Start there.  To the c-suite executives I say, look in the mirror.  Would YOU be willing to work in any clinical role in your setting?  I mean, really, pick one.  And then go work there for a month.  THEN tell me how your tech-driven solutions and automations improved your professional wellbeing and mental health.