I’ve been a bedside nurse in general medicine for 6 years and only recently did I decide to take my career from the bedside to business.

I’m surprised I stayed at the bedside for as long as I did. It was absolutely a bit of a bumpy ride. And if I could do it all over again, I might have chosen a different route. Because to be very honest, bedside nursing is brutal.

You want proof?

As I researched for this article, Dr. Google’s algorithm provided me with “Bedside nursing is killing me.” Now yes, that made me chuckle, but I also have a profound sense of understanding for that sentiment because when I wrote this blog post, I was in the thick of it.

Just in case you’re not sure what I mean by “bedside nurse”, they are the nurses that provide direct patient care in settings like the hospital or residential care facilities.

And you should absolutely do your research before pursuing a career in healthcare and jumping head first into this profession.

I’m not saying, “Don’t become a nurse.”

On the contrary, you should become a nurse, but I also want you to be aware of your options as a nurse, because you don’t have to be in an overwhelming, stressful specialty that causes you burnout. Do your research about the different areas and specialties available to make the best choice for your personality, mental/emotional health, and lifestyle.

Intravenous medication hanging from pole

Here’s what you should know before becoming a Bedside Nurse:

1 | ‘SICK CARE’ VERSUS HEALTH CARE

Don’t be fooled—healthcare as we know is really a system of 'sick care', where it merely provides symptom control rather than disease prevention.

Some patients you may see in hospitals become ‘frequent flyers’, which means they continuously return to the hospital for treatment of acute exacerbations for lifelong chronic diseases that could have been easily prevented had it been addressed early on. And it’s only going to get worse.

According to Marvasti (2012), “A key feature of U.S. health care is its use of a piecemeal, task-based system that reimburses for “sick visits” aimed at addressing acute conditions or acute exacerbations of chronic conditions.” Unfortunately, Marvesti (2012) also explains that chronic conditions and diseases will only increase and continue to outpace reductions in acute illness.

The changes you want to see in healthcare aren’t necessarily impossible or unrealistic. Still, it will take a systematic shift in the current processes that are in place, which has proven to be slow and painful. Essentially this is due to economic, cultural, and technological obstacles preventing the system from seeing any real change (Marvesti, 2012).

As a bedside nurse, you’re just a player in the ‘sick care’ game, and you will have to play by the rules of the game, even when you know there’s a better way.

Systemic change can happen and hopefully will happen in the coming years. Still, chronic conditions and disease will always be a part of the system, regardless if we continue to increase preventive measures in our healthcare.

2 | VERBAL & PHYSICAL VIOLENCE

Violence in the workplace is one thing that I definitely was not prepared for when I decided to be a bedside nurse, and it honestly blindsided me the first time it happened.

You will likely experience verbal and physical violence in nursing, but even more so when you’re at the bedside providing direct patient care.

Abuse within this industry varies from disrespectful managers, intimidating physicians, lateral nurse-to-nurse bullying, and patient-to-nurse violence.

I genuinely wish this wasn’t the case and violence wasn't a part of this list. I wish I could tell you patients and colleagues will be respectful of you. I wish I could say to you your time and energy will be respected. I wish I could tell you your physical space will be respected. I cannot, in good conscience, tell you that you won’t experience workplace violence or abuse as a bedside nurse.

The American Nurses Association (ANA) states 1 in 4 nurses have been assaulted but only a fraction of victims will report the incident. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The health care and social service industries experience the highest rates of injuries caused by workplace violence and are 5 times as likely to suffer a workplace violence injury than workers overall.”

It’s a problem within healthcare that needs a resolution. However, even if we see improvement, violence in the healthcare workplace won’t be eradicated entirely. You have to be aware of and prepared for this type of behavior when you become a bedside nurse so you can take the necessary precautions to protect yourself and your colleagues.

3 | NURSE-TO-PATIENT RATIOS

If you’re going to work as a bedside nurse, you should be aware of your hospitals’ staffing ratios and whether or not they have mandated safe staffing policies to protect their nurses and patients.

According to ANA, only 16 states in the U.S. have regulations addressing nurse staffing in hospitals and clinical areas. So, unfortunately, if you’re in the U.S., you’ll likely encounter unsafe staffing at some point in your career.

Additionally, unsafe nurse-to-patient ratios lead to poor patient outcomes, extended length of stays, and can increase patient mortality. Studies have also shown when a nurse-to-patient ratio is greater than 4 patients to 1 nurse, with each additional patient, there is a 7% increase in hospital mortality that could be caused by patient infections, bedsores, pneumonia, cardiac arrest, and accidental death.

There’s no question you have to prepare yourself for this type of work environment when you become a bedside nurse. Therefore, you need to consider this when deciding what type of nurse you want to become and what specialty you want to work in.

4 | LITIGATIONS IN HEALTHCARE

Nurses are a part of an extensive and intricate healthcare system. Therefore, when medical errors happen, it is likely the result of a system error, not the result of one single person. However, malpractice lawsuits do happen, and someone will take the blame.

During my research for this section, I couldn’t find an exact number of malpractice lawsuits directly involving nurses. However, a study by JustPoint states, “The number of cases in the United States tends to vary by state, with an average of 85,000 cases filed each year.” In addition, in the National Practitioner Data Bank, in the last ten years, approximately 53,000 adverse reports were made each year, and about 1,200 medical malpractice lawsuits were paid out each year.

Keep in mind these numbers are for all medical malpractice lawsuits and not specific for nurses. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be aware of the possibility of medical malpractice within the nursing profession. It is possible, and it can result in the loss of your license.

You can learn more about Nurses’ Malpractice Insurance claims report to better protect yourself from possible claims in the future. You can download the PDF file directly from NSO’s website and read about the details of various types of nursing lawsuits and how to avoid them.

5 | MENTAL, EMOTIONAL, & PHYSICAL BURNOUT

Exhausted doesn’t even begin to explain how tired you will feel before, during, and after every shift. In conversations with my nurse friends about burnout that we experience as bedside nurses, we all agree there is no getting around the mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion.

Nursing is a demanding profession; you must learn to take care of yourself first so you don’t burn out like many nurses do.

According to a study done in 2021 by Nurse CE Central, “Of the thousands of nurse participants from across the country, a staggering 95% reported feeling burnt-out in their nursing position within the last three years, with 47.9% reporting that they are actively looking for a less stressful nursing position, to leave the nursing profession all together, or have done so within the last three years due to burnout.”

Burnout is the reason why I started writing this blog.

I reached a point in my nursing career where I felt like I could not continue. However, I taught myself how to cope and continue caring for others, even during burnout, and that’s what I wanted to share when I thought about starting a blog. While at the time of writing this specific blog post, I am still working full-time at the bedside. This experience of writing has been therapeutic, even cathartic, and in many ways, helped me survive burnout.

You can learn how to take care of yourself to prevent or recover from burnout symptoms, just like I did. I have a growing collection of resources on this blog to help with self-care and recovery from burn out. You can also subscribe to my newsletter, The Huddle, to get holistic career tips straight to your inbox like the internet besties we are (shameless plug, amiright?).

6 | GRIEF, SADNESS, & OVERWHELM

Grief, sadness, anxiety, and overwhelm are only a few emotions you’ll have to work through and learn to cope with as a nurse. But, unfortunately, no one teaches you these skills in school.

There isn’t a class in nursing school that shows you how to process difficult emotions and challenging experiences. This type of skill is simply something you have to learn as you go through your career.

Not everyone processes their experiences the same way, so there’s no one size fits all solution. If you’re like me and struggle with putting language to your feelings and experiences, getting the support you need can be challenging. You have to learn as you go and be prepared for difficult emotions to be overwhelming at times.

7 | LACK OF SUPPORT

During a travel assignment last year, I realized how important it is to have camaraderie among your colleagues, colleagues who genuinely caring for each other, and colleagues with more of a team mindset.

When you’re on a unit where you know the other nurses and have built a relationship with them, it is exponentially easier to work as a team to get through patient care and cope with burnout.

Being a nurse is simultaneously a one woman show and a team effort.

Nurses ARE part of a multidisciplinary medical team to provide adequate care to hospitalized patients. However, the nurse is responsible for carrying out orders from various services of the medical team, meaning the nurse is most often at the bedside.

Sometimes it can feel like you’re the only one doing the work, especially when your unit is short-staffed, your team has low morale, and you have a heavy patient load.

Sometimes some shifts feel like you’re drowning, and there’s no one to save you; there’s no one to even throw you a life vest.

8 | YOUR TIME MAY NOT BE RESPECTED

In bedside nursing, there is usually little time to catch a break. You’ll often be rushing to eat lunch or won’t even have time to eat lunch. On some shifts, you may forget to drink any water. Sometimes you may hold your bladder for 12+ hours and not even realize it.

Technically speaking, only 21 states in the U.S. have regulations on required break time for employees. Side note, let me know if you were absolutely shocked by this because I definitely was when I found this in my research.

You may be lucky to work in a state or a hospital that mandates lunches, but not everyone is so fortunate, and you should absolutely consider this before accepting a bedside nurse position, because any time you get to have to yourself during your shift is oh-so-precious.

9 | BEDSIDE NURSING ISN’T ALL ABOUT THE PATIENT

As a part of the medical team, nurses are the ones that spend the most time with the patients, but just because you spend the most amount of time with the patients doesn’t mean that ALL of your time is with the patient.

While being at the bedside gives you a lot of opportunities to help people, you can still feel like you’re not doing enough simply because there’s not enough time.

In bedside nursing, especially in general medical surgical bedside nursing, you are taking care of 4 to 7 (maybe more) patients at a time, so all of your individual patient care has to be divided between these 4 to 7 patients. This will generally mean that you won’t necessarily be able to form a relationship with each individual patient.

That can be a tough pill to swallow for some people, but there’s so much more that goes into patient care than simply caring for the patient.

Certain task will inevitably pull your attention away from the bedside, like how you’ll have to spend a large chunk of your shift at the computer simply documenting assessments. Another extremely time-consuming but necessary task is pulling and passing medications for all 4-7 patients, and this happens multiple times throughout the day.

As a bedside nurse, you must be prepared that only some of your time will be focused on caring for your patients, and you have to learn to be okay with that.

If you got into nursing because you want to help people, being at the bedside is only one way to accomplish that. Honestly, the bedside may not be the area of nursing in which your ideas and skills would be best suited to make the most amount of impact in your community. You just have to do your research and decide what’s best for you and the people you want to serve.

10 | POOP, URINE, BLOOD, VOMIT, SPUTUM, & MYSTERY STAINS

At this point, we’ve learned that bedside nursing is a lot of things; however, glamorous is not one.

I don’t think anything can prepare you for the amount of poop, urine, blood, vomit, sputum, and splashes (of all kinds) that you will experience as a bedside nurse. If you don’t have a strong stomach (or extra scrubs available), I would seriously consider another area of nursing.

I really don’t have much else to say about it. This one was short, sweet, and to the point. Bedside nursing isn’t glamorous, period.

11 | YOU ARE MORE THAN ‘JUST A NURSE’

Nurses are the medical team's eyes, ears, noses, and hands. Here’s an informal list of all the unconventional requirements a bedside nurse will have to complete at some point during their shift:

Writer + record keeper
Counselor
Care Coordinator
Transportation Specialist
Wound Specialist
Phlebotomist
Respiratory Therapist
Consultant
Speech Pathologist
Weight lifter

Educator
Pharmacist
Advocate
Housekeeper
Plumber
Physical Therapist
Emotional support
Problem solver
Speed walker
Verbal punching bag

Nurses have to be a jack of all trades, especially at the bedside and even more so for those at chronically short-staffed facilities.

We are the part of the medical team that is most often at the bedside and spend the most time with the patient to carry out orders from all the various parts of the medical team. Sometimes that means that we are more than ‘just a nurse’.

Bedside nursing isn’t for everyone…

Bedside nursing is some of the most demanding, challenging, and stressful areas of nursing you can work in. You won’t always be able to give the level of care you want to give to your patients, you may experience overwhelm and burnout at times, you may lack the support you need, and you may even get unidentifiable mystery substances smeared across your scrubs.

Still, you will always be more than ‘just a nurse’; for that, you can forever be proud of this profession. And when you decide you’re too burnt-out to continue, you can learn to reinvent what it means to be a nurse and wake up every day saying, “I love being nurse.”

I hope this article gave you a little insight into what it means to be a bedside nurse so you can make an informed decision about what area of nursing you want to work in. And if you’re currently a bedside nurse looking to leave the bedside for good, check out my FREE Notion dashboard full of resources to do just that.

Realities of Bedside Nursing: What to Consider Before Pursuing a Career in Healthcare