Substance Abuse Among Nurses

For many individuals, the word “nurse” may oftentimes be associated with the practices of caring, compassion, helping, and healing. While these connotations can be very true for many nurses, there exist a number of barriers which can sometimes prevent this idea from being a reality. One such obstacle is that of the impaired nurse or a nurse who abuses mood-altering substances, or otherwise suffers from their effects, during the provision of patient care.

Clearly a nurse who is working while under the influence presents a very real and serious threat to the well-beings of his or her patients, colleagues, and the public at large. While it is obvious to most that the initial intervention in these instances should be to relieve the nurse of duty in order to protect clients, many find themselves questioning what the most appropriate next action to take is. The ultimate questions then becomes: “Is it ethical to allow nurses who have been found of working while impaired to return to practice following successful completion of treatment?”.

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The Issue

This is a very complex and multi-dimensional issue with caring and well-intentioned individuals on both sides of the argument. Naturally, a nurse who has allowed substances to impair his or her judgment during a shift in the past, is more likely to commit similar acts in the future when compared to his or her non-substance-abusing peers. This notion suggests that allowing a nurse with an established history of substance abuse poses an immediate threat to the patients who he or she may “care” for.

On the other hand, state boards of nursing and nurse-employers would be behooved to recognize that addiction has been widely accepted as a disease by many professional and medical circles. With this in mind, one could certainly argue that these organizations have a responsibility to the nurses who suffer from this malady in assisting them to obtain the treatment which they need so that they may return to helping patients achieve optimal
health levels.

Clearly this dilemma has implications for the addicted nurses themselves, but such an issue becomes magnified when considering the nursing shortage which is expected to continue to ravage the nation. While it may be convenient to simply revoke the licenses of all addicted nurses, this very possibly may likely prove to be impractical, let alone terribly unsafe. Indeed, so many facilities throughout the country are in such dire need of competent and caring nurses and many of these could very easily be those in recovery from substance use disorders.

There are many reasons why such a topic is worthy of research and better understanding. Not only is the subject matter so often overlooked and stigmatized, but the author has personal motivation for looking into this area. In his capacity as a nurse at drug and alcohol treatment facility, the author works with many individuals who lead professional roles, including those in healthcare, who are also finding their own lives ravaged by this chronic disease state. Other than the patients themselves, the author also has many nurse colleagues who are in recovery from substance use disorders and it is important to have a better appreciation and understanding of where these people have come from and how they have been able to lead productive lives focused on helping and caring for others who find themselves in situations not too unlike the ones from these nurses’ pasts.

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