25 Sep Work-Life Balance, Nursing, and Agency Work
It’s well-documented that the nursing profession has consumed any notion of work-life balance. This has far-reaching consequences: nurses’ failure to recognise their own psychological and physiological needs; chronic anxiety and burnout; higher staffing turnover and resignation rates; and the disrepute of nursing–many would-be nurses are discouraged from becoming nurses because of its startling imbalance of sacrifice and reward. In July 2024, The Nursing Times reported that UK nursing university applications had fallen to the lowest level in five years.
Nurses should not be inherently martyrs; however, their strict workflows, stringent rotas, irregular work hours, health and safety risks, emotional abuse, and constant exposure to death and the dying make almost all nurses fall victim to a lack of work-life balance. In numerous studies, nurses’ martyrdom has been directly correlated to compassion fatigue, burnout, mental health problems, and excessive absences.
How can nurses create work-life balance despite fixed rotas and rife exhaustion–and is agency work the answer?
Work-Life Balance and Its Contentiousness in Healthcare
Although work-life balance is encouraged, nurses have climbing amounts of work thrust at them because of the global nurse shortage. As more nurses resign, the remaining nurses must take on the work left behind, making for higher nurse-to-patient ratios and subsequently, service degradation, elevated burnout rates, decreased job satisfaction and greater work-life conflict.
This causes unconscious discouragement of work-life balance at an organisational level since nurses must pick up more shifts and work overtime to compensate for the multiplied workload. Permanent nursing staff bear the brunt of this, working at least 37.5 hours on a fixed rota—they have little to no agency in their work-life balance choices.
Most individuals who become nurses are ambitious and have incredibly high expectations of themselves. They are rigorously trained professionals who can recognise stressors in a patient, and then create and implement a care plan at a glance, but somehow can’t do the same for themselves.
To cope with the repercussions of poor work-life balance, nurses must create and implement their own evidence-based care plan: recognise what they feel they lack most in their lives, and then integrate it. Here’s how.
Creating Work-Life Balance as a Nurse
Begin by identifying the stressors most present in your life. Ask yourself what’s keeping you from being happy at home and work. What processes could you implement to drive the change you need, and who could support you? Think of family, friends, colleagues, and managers.
For example:
Marta is a PICU RN who works perm rota at a local NHS trust. She works 3 12-hour shifts per week. On her off days, she looks after her toddler. Marta decides to improve her work-life balance. She asks her mother to babysit her toddler once a week so she can have time at home doing absolutely nothing. Her mother agrees, and Marta spends Saturdays relaxing and doing some much-deserved self-care.
Coping Strategies That Compliment Work-Life Balance
Besides work-life balance, studies have shown that nurses with characteristics like hardiness and who practice self-care do better despite their lack of free time.
A paper from the International Journal of Nursing Studies entitled The Relationship between Socio-Demographic Variables, Job Stressors, Burnout, and Hardy Personality in Nurses: an Exploratory Study found that nurses who were hardy were less likely to feel burnt out. It defined hardiness as a personality trait that encompasses three key dimensions: commitment, control, and challenge.
These dimensions reflect an individual’s engagement in life, recognition of their influence on events, and orientation towards change. The authors argue that hardiness lessens the negative effects of stress through optimistic perceptions and specific coping strategies.
Qualities of resilience include social competence, problem-solving ability, resistance to failure, and a sense of purpose. Social competence is a response to positive feedback, empathy, the ability to move between different cultures, flexibility, communication skills, and a sense of humour. Resistance to failure is the refusal to accept negative messages about oneself, detachment, and persistence.
If you feel pessimistic about work and feel like you want to leave, it might seem a bit misguided to attempt to change your entire personality. There are small steps you can take to develop resilience, like:
- Positive self-talk. Encouraging yourself that you can keep going. “Just 20 more minutes. I can do hard things.”
- Social support networks. Reach out to family, colleagues, and friends.
- Cardiovascular exercise has been shown to reduce stress. Think jogging and HIIT workouts
Remember that you can persevere through anything. The human spirit is unbreakable.
Agency Work and Nursing
The International Journal of Human Resources published that 81% of their respondents reported the flexibility of agency work was of more importance than its profitability. Usually, NHS rosters are published 6 weeks in advance, whereas nurses can choose shifts weekly with agency work; “agency work enabled them to attain a better work-life balance, reinforcing the findings of Tailby (2005) [concept of free agency] that NHS employment had failed to provide an adequate work-life balance.”
Could agency work be for you?
Is Nurse Agency Work for You?
If you’re tired of working on rigorous rota systems and feel you need work-life balance, consider agency work. This is a system of nursing recruitment wherein nurses work on an on-demand basis. Hospitals and healthcare facilities commission healthcare recruitment facilities like Proximity Healthcare to provide them with nurses on short notice to replace permanent nurses who are off sick or suddenly cannot work.
Proximity Healthcare is one of the UK’s best healthcare recruitment agencies. We hire international and UK-national nurses to work in some of the best places in the UK.
Our team has more than 30 years of experience helping HCAs, nurses, care workers, and other healthcare practitioners find roles perfect for them in places they love. We negotiate with our network of hospitals, clinics, outpatient facilities, and more to ensure you’ll get a competitive salary, flexible schedules, and career growth opportunities.
Contact Proximity Healthcare today and find your next best perfect healthcare job.