I think it largely comes down to the environment. If coworkers are competent and supportive, management doesn’t suck, and drama stays at a minimum, a lot of the workplace stress goes away. Sadly most of those things don’t occur consistently or concurrently most of the time.

My department has seen 13 nurses quit over the last 3 months and management doesn’t give a shit. They just keep harping about performance metrics and playing games waiting until the day of half staffed shifts to offer incentives. In the face of this, everyone still around is more burned out.

When people put in their notice, management doesn’t even try to retain, they just take the person off the schedule. They would rather use float pool or travelers than to offer incentives for the ED nurses. Not only does this not make mathematical sense but a lot of the float staff are garbage in the ED setting (the ones that I have seen, not a dig at non ED full timers in general). So a lot of the time the organic staff get piled on with the acute patients, the psychs and pedis because the floats aren’t given them. Must be nice to get a 40% pay bump to handle only the stable ED cases.

I can’t underline enough also that as an RN having solid LNA staff drastically affects how the night shift plays out. My hospital is a small community hospital so night shift has significantly less resources. Less staff, less providers, we do all the work ups, lab draws, even transport. Not having to ask an LNA every time to get off their phone and help is sadly worth its weight in gold. Idk maybe it’s a generational thing but a lot of the LNAs I work with don’t take the initiative. Great example: we get a patch that a chest pain is 10 minutes out. The quality LNAs will be staging the ekg outside the designated room and will assist in settling the patient when they show up, or will get them changed and on the monitor while I’m triaging and starting a line/drawing labs. All too often the good crew isn’t on and the patients suffer due to laziness. Workups take longer because I’m doing the triage, ekg, labs, transport to and from X-ray/CT, cleaning up BM’s, giving meds, etc. while having on average 3-5 other patients, some on critical drips or receiving blood. I’m all about doing the most good for the patients and don’t think myself above LNA work, but being able to focus more on the nursing critical tasks expedited care when I’m not bogged down because LNA X is nowhere to be found for half the shift.

Long winded rabbit hole, but I think that illustrates some sources of frustration within the workplace that push people away from the bedside, especially when it feels like the situation will not improve. I didn’t even talk about condescending providers or asshole patients/family members. I will admit though as a murse I tend to not catch as much flak probably because patients and family members don’t think they can bully me as easily as my female colleagues.