Nurse to nurse: How this network is creating support for healthcare workers

Posted on 11 April, 2023

For nurse Ana Vavrek, her burnout came on slowly, tempered at first by the chaos of the pandemic until symptoms of severe exhaustion, anxiety and lingering stress could no longer be ignored.

Like every nurse around the world, Ana was forced to be the bearer of endless hats during the pandemic, fighting to squash one of the biggest threats to public health in a generation.

Caught in a dangerous mix of playing endless catch-up, overcrowding, exposure threats, lack of support, ‘unprecedented times’, and minimal resources, Ana found herself without a moment to breathe.

“Up until the pandemic, most of my career had been running pretty smoothly,” she says. “Then all of a sudden, there was a lot of rhetoric around ‘fighting on the front lines’ and ‘attacking this’ as if we were soldiers. And that sort of didn’t gel well with my personality—it became unmanageable to deal with that uncertainty.”

“It was during that time that I got burnt out, and I think it was a slow build-up to that point, and that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

As Ana reflects on her journey through the pandemic, she says it took reaching “rock bottom” to start rebuilding her life—and in typical nurse spirit, she started thinking of how she could help other nurses along the way.

And so, the Huddle Nurse Network began to take form—a community-driven initiative where nurses could connect with one another, upend their pandemic identity and embrace self-care as a form of resilience.

“The pandemic was the catalyst for me wanting to do more. I still wanted to be a nurse, but I wanted to support nurses who were experiencing a similar situation to me or actually prevent burnout from happening altogether.”

“At the beginning of 2021, I started training as a life coach, but it’s only in recent months that I decided to make the network happen. And so, since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working out how and what I could do to support nurses and find ways of letting the nursing community know that this exists.”

“I started a Facebook group, and I want to run events where we nurses can get together and build that wider community outside of work.”

On Friday 14 April, this dream will become a reality with Ana’s first in-person workshop taking place—a small but mighty step toward pushing forward conversations that not only acknowledge burnout but offer practical solutions to create day-to-day change.

“I want my event to give nurses and midwives the chance to have that breather for a couple of hours, but also to connect with one another and meet people, and motivate each other to find that passion that brought them to nursing in the first place.”

“I also want to remind them that they’re not just a nurse, they’re also a wife, a mother…”

Ana also acknowledges that the journey toward burnout treatment and prevention is long and amorphous, suggesting that perhaps the heart of the problem so often intertwines with what makes nurses so good at their jobs—they simply care too much.

“There has always been this ingrained belief that nurses do give, give, give, and never take the break, always say yes to double shifts or overtime, and the fact that’s a belief ingrained in all nurses, which is something really hard to change.”

As for the future of the network, Ana says her focus is putting burnout at the forefront of our conversations, with her own experience shaping a new generation of nurses, who no longer bear the weight of our healthcare system alone.

“The whole reason behind the support network was to bring awareness to what burnout is because a lot of people go through their lives and think that what they’re experiencing is normal until they cannot function anymore.”

“So validating those experiences and bringing awareness of signs and symptoms allows nurses to understand that their experiences are real—and we are here to support them through that.”

Please note the feature image is a stock image