By Mike Renzella
The Haldimand Press
DUNNVILLE—National Nursing Week, May 10 to 16 2021, is a time to show support to our nurses and to honour the enormous amount of work they, along with their teammates across the health care field, put in to our local community.
We spoke with two nurses, working on opposite spectrums of the current COVID pandemic, to find out what life is really like day to day on the frontlines at the Haldimand War Memorial Hospital (HWMH) and the vaccination clinic at the Cayuga Memorial Arena.
Bonnie Seaith, RN
“When I was 10, I fell and broke my arm and spent a week in hospital. A young nurse took me under her wing and let me hang out with her and help with the younger children. At that time, parents weren’t allowed to stay, back in the 60s. I decided then and there I wanted to be a nurse,” said Seaith, a long-time registered nurse at HWMH.
She described the traits needed to make it as a nurse: “Compassion, good listening skills, humour, and just wanting to help people.”
While Seaith worked in the emergency room for many years, she was off work last year as she recovered from an accident. Seaith is now part of the vaccine administration team in Cayuga and has found her time at the vaccination clinic to be surprisingly positive, despite the circumstances: “We’ve had so many compliments on how well it’s running, so many ‘thank you for doing what we’re doing’. It’s phenomenal. You go home feeling great, feeling positive about what you do. It’s so nice to be able to make people happy in the situation that we’re in.”
Seaith is part of a team of six nurses and a doctor responsible for completing roughly 600 vaccinations in an eight-hour shift. She believes we are not out of the woods yet, even with the large number of vaccines rolling out: “I don’t know if we’ve gotten to the point where it’s going to get better. We’re in for the long haul. The more we vaccinate, the better we are. It’s going to be a while, I feel.”
She touched on how her colleagues are making it through this moment: “We’re like family. When we have a tough day or patient that we’re worried about or hasn’t gone well, we always try to make time in that shift to get together and discuss how things went and give each other support.
Andrea Richardson, Nurse Practitioner
“I’ve been nursing for over 13 years now. I started in Toronto at Mount Sinai Hospital in the emergency department,” said Richardson, who later went back to school and earned a Master’s degree to become a Nurse Practitioner (NP).
She initially worked at a family clinic in Grimsby as an NP before coming to HWMH last July: “I also did some humanitarian work in Papua New Guinea and I worked with the health care provider there and realized there is such a need for health care, not just locally but internationally as well.”
Richardson’s mom was a nurse, and as a child Andrea was always interested in what she did: “I guess I followed suit, you could say.”
As an NP, Richardson’s responsibilities include assessing patients, ordering specialized tests, performing ultrasounds and x-rays, and diagnosing illnesses.
“When people ask what an NP is, in a nutshell we can do pretty much the same things as a doctor, with the exception of not doing surgery or more specialized work,” said Richardson.
She explained the difference between an NP and an RN: “Nursing has a more limited scope of practice. They’re working off the orders that we, as NPs or doctors, give.”
On the effects of the pandemic, Richardson said, “There’s a heightened level of anxiety when we see these COVID patients coming in, and we get worried as staff…. Things that are mandated by the government, such as critical care triage, really scare us because sometimes it feels like we’re withholding care to patients and I think that’s going to cause anxiety as well.”
“We have an amazing leadership team at the hospital, wanting to hear our concerns and escalating our concerns,” she continued. “I’ve never worked in an environment where we’re so supportive of each other; we text each other after our workdays saying, ‘thanks for a good shift’ or ‘you’re a great team member’. That’s so helpful in our camaraderie and keeping spirits up even though days can be stressful and busy.”
She concluded, “I’m hopeful that things will turn around, we’ve been hit hard in the third wave. We’re seeing more of the variants and sicker patients for sure…. In the summer months people won’t be as willing to stay at home and not gather with family, and I can see it lingering longer unless we do our job and stay at home and stay away from people.”
