The current COVID-19 surge has pushed hospitals in Minnesota to the thinnest of seasons since the pandemic began, with ICU capacity reaching an all-time low in recent weeks. Although the number of cases is lower than last winter’s peak, there are now fewer medical workers in the state and burnout is taking its toll.
To deal with this, many hospitals turn to traveling nurses – Kirstin Wilson is one such expert. She recently returned to Minnesota to be with her family after spending more than a year working in various West Coast hospitals. She spoke to MPR News guest host Steven John.
The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity. You can hear the entire conversation with the audio player above.
Give us an example of one of the more extreme on-site scenarios during a surge in patients due to COVID-19.
I had an assignment in Nevada where we were in a hospital that was completely overwhelmed with COVID patients. You may have seen something in news articles when a parking garage with 700 baby beds opened to care for COVID patients.
At 16.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP via Getty Images
I wasn’t working in the garage at the time, but in a unit that reopened as a COVID unit. And it wasn’t set up as a hospital yet, so there was no medicine, the right supplies to care for the patients. At that time we didn’t have adequate PPE. And where I normally would have had maybe two of these patients for one shift, I had 10 of them and was sometimes the head nurse as well.
Have you just stopped by the different hospitals you are assigned to? Or do you receive location-specific training and instructions?
That’s one of the hardest parts of being a travel nurse, working with less and less information and falling into the deep end sooner. As a nurse, you always have to adapt well, and I think that’s something a lot of travel nurses are really good at.
But with COVID, they had to get people into the job so quickly that we didn’t have the full training they would normally have – how their equipment works and how to find the right people in an acute emergency.
Was the situation in Reno when you really realized how serious COVID-19 was?
No, long before I came to Nevada, I was working south of [Los Angeles]. That was when LA was having a really tough time. And there I saw so many patients come to me, sometimes I would work with them for a month and do everything I could to help them get through the day and then I would watch them die. And so I was pretty emotionally bullied back then.
And when I was trying to get some time off from COVID and take a little respite, this Nevada job that was supposed to be with heart patients came along. That’s the patient population I’ve worked with in Minnesota, so we were really excited to take this job. And when we got there, it was our worst situation for us in the hospital regarding COVID.
The worst part was that there was really no more satisfaction doing our job. There is no longer any satisfaction that we can help a patient because I got to the point where I felt that I couldn’t even help someone comfortably die.
How do you think your travel experience as a traveling nurse has affected you and how does that affect the people you leave behind when you move on to another job?
I have only recently re-contacted some of the nurses I have been to at this hospital and they have all been able to tell me that they are not sure they can still work in the hospital.
One said she returned to Tennessee after her assignment and was diagnosed with PTSD. And another did what she hoped, one last travel assignment, hoping to save enough money to go back to nursing school and switch to holistic medicine because she believed she could no longer work in a hospital.
I’ve also personally done a lot of therapy to see if I can go back to the hospital just because of the trauma I experienced over the past year.
That would be my next question. What does your future hold in store?
Now that I’m back here in Minnesota and things are the way they are in Minnesota, I’ve been trying to start a day job where you can just pick up shifts at the local hospitals.
It’s really hard, I think, as a nurse – and a lot of nurses sense it – it’s hard to sit here and know that you can help, but somehow question whether you can really do it at this point in time. So I’ve come back to a place where I think I might want to try this again. But there is a good chance that I will come back to the hospital and then be put into similar situations and, you know, I will no longer be able to continue my job.
What would you say to people who might think the situation is not as serious as the news media might portray it?
My personal opinion is that, you know, every time I drive a car, ride a mountain bike, or do anything that I’m a little more at risk – things that I normally don’t care about that much – I do the thought: “Oh my god, I don’t want to go to the hospital now.” If I am injured or have a car accident, I am very afraid of the treatment I might get in the hospital.
It’s not because not everyone who works there is going to be doing their best, it’s just not having the resources that hospitals need in terms of staffing, especially to care for people the way they deserve.
This is probably good advice for all of us to be careful. In addition, how can we better support nurses and staff in hospitals?
I definitely don’t want to stop anyone from going out and mountain biking or doing the activities they love, because of course we know that this also keeps us healthy in many ways.
Kirstin Wilson mountain biking near Palo Alto, California.
Courtesy Kirstin Wilson
But of course, vaccines are great. I am a big advocate of vaccination. The work in the vaccination clinic was really exciting in the beginning, getting so many people vaccinated. But at the end of that time, it was really hard to see how much decline we had if we didn’t have the numbers we were expecting.
So I mean, of course, vaccinations and then masks and things that we’ve found work and just being aware of what you can do to help, if that can work in a hospital or just can help Help your community or that is your family and just encourage them to make good decisions.
You can hear the entire conversation with the audio player above.
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