In the ICU when COVID-19 hit, Katie Blackwell never once thought about not coming to work.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Katie Blackwell didn’t grow up thinking she would be a nurse. It’s actually her second career after first managing art supply stores. However, she realized she needed a more steady career, especially since she wanted a family.
“So I was like, ‘nutrition, that sounds great,'” she recalled. “I knew nothing about nutrition. But in those classes were a bunch of nursing students because they’re all the same prerequisites and I was so jealous of all the stuff that they were telling me about and I was like, ‘You do that in nursing? That’s what a nurse does?’ I thought that we just took blood pressures and that is not at all what we do. We do so much more. So I very quickly transferred and started in the nursing program and have been so happy ever since.”
She’s now been with Atrium Health for 11 years.
“I started out on a tele, a cardiac tele floor, and then quickly moved to ICU and I’ve been in ICU since,” she said.
That includes when the COVID-19 pandemic started in March of 2020.
“So during COVID that was a very exhausting job because it was every — it was a lot of patients that needed that level of help,” Blackwell said. “Nowhere had enough beds in critical care to fulfill that so we ended up, I would jump from room to room to room.”
According to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, approximately 100,000 registered nurses left the workforce during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic due to stress, burnout and retirements.
Blackwell said she never thought about stepping away.
“I didn’t even consider not going in the next day,” she said. “I often wanted to go in extra because they needed it.”
But she said she understands why some people did leave.
“None of it is a selfish reason,” Blackwell said. “It was because their families needed them in a different way or they had to move somewhere else or maybe there was something that was going on in their family because so many people were very sick at that time, including health care workers and their families.”
The National Council of State Boards of Nursing also found another 610,000 nurses report an “intent to leave” the workforce by 2027 due to stress, burnout and retirement.
Blackwell encourages people to stay, even if it’s shifting your role.
“No matter what your your passion is you will find a place in the nursing field,” she said. “You can do policy or informatics. You can do technology stuff, you can do virtual, you can work with any demographic, you can work remotely, you can do home health, and then there’s the whole leadership track too. Nursing is the backbone of health care.”
Blackwell adds that even during the hard times, the patients are worth it.
“This gentleman came back after he was able to walk and talk and we were like, ‘You look like a completely different person,'” she said. “It was so heartwarming and also really shocking because we just — I hadn’t thought about how far a patient can heal from the time that they’re with us.”
