So, you think swimming with sharks is stressful?

“Mostly I think it would be surprising sweetheart. Why do you ask?”

“I think I would be scared,” she said.

“Do you want to be the next Dorothy?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “I want to be a swimming teacher.” Before adding: “But I may do some singing too.”

“Do you think you will find teaching people how to swim stressful?” I asked, remembering the hell that was trying to teach her mother to swim in any direction other than downwards.

“Nope,” she said confidently. “Unless there were sharks involved.”

“Do sharks need to be taught how to swim?” I asked. “Walk yes, type yes, but swim?”

“Good point,” she lied. “Swimming teacher it is.”

‘It is wholly illogical to imagine that nurses can soak up stressors like sponges and simply
wring themselves out when they get home’

Which is about as profound as it gets in our house. I don’t tell her I hope she isn’t drawn to very stressful work, that she does not find herself ruminating the way many nurses can, where you find your head still at work hours after the rest of you left. We can’t choose what our children do, can we?

Last week the long running Danish Cohort study involving more than 12,000 nurses aged 45-64 told us that women who considered their jobs stressful were 25 per cent more likely to develop heart disease than those who considered them manageable. I often wonder what we might do with information like this. If we accepted the strong possibility that doing stressful work like nursing is bad for your health, we might expect that we (by which I mean the nursing population or the government, or a concerned society anxious to protect the wellbeing of its carers) would have to do something helpful. We don’t want nurses to be sacrificed on the alter of stress do we?

Yet we have a sense of jobs like nursing being potentially unhealthy don’t we? If we look at suicide rates by profession, nursing is top of the list. So it’s not unreasonable to deduce that the accumulated act of nursing might make some nurses vulnerable.

These things are not often discussed. Perhaps because we don’t know what to do with the knowledge; perhaps because we have long accepted as an inescapable truth that stress and all that comes with it is simply “part of the job”. If you can’t take it go into telesales. Or management.

It is wholly illogical to imagine that nurses or any other people doing significant emotional labour can soak up stressors like sponges and simply wring themselves out when they get home. And it is almost medieval to imagine that we cannot build our recognition of stress as harmful into the way we configure clinical services, whether by mandatory supervision, sabbatical or clinical exchanges, co-mentoring or simply more staff.

We have tolerated the target mentality. We have survived professionalisation. Might it not make sense to construct an era of sustainability? Of constructing resilience? And promoting nurse wellbeing? Shouldn’t that ultimately come first?

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