Oct 2, 2026 · 37 min · 12 segments
Critical care nursing can be immensely rewarding, but it also carries a significant emotional burden. In this episode, we are joined by Tracy Cartwright and Daniel Hodgkins to explore the…
So it is clear then that critical care nurses are repeatedly exposed to serious illness, trauma, uncertainty and death.
What emotional impact can this have over time? And why is it important to talk about it openly?
And you could, you know, you could go through weeks of months of being exposed, you know, to really upsetting traumatic stories and you would kind of, you'd cope okay with it, you know, you'd be okay.
You'd feel like you could keep a professional hat on, that maybe it didn't follow you home too much.
And then you'd suddenly hit a week or a day when you struggle with it a lot more.
Whereas maybe there's a particular patient that you care for, a group of patients that just, it feels a lot more personal and suddenly it is affecting you.
I think for me also, you're so used to being exposed to all these potentially quite tragic, quite traumatic stories, it almost starts to normalise a little bit in your brain.
You maybe don't realise that you're being exposed to such an emotional burden because it's just happening all the time and your colleagues are being exposed to something similar and it can start to seem quite normal for you.
And then I think potentially that's when you're more at risk of starting to struggle without maybe realising that you're struggling.
I don't think there's ever one big traumatic event that might cause emotional burden.
I often think it's like an accumulation of lots of things that we witness and we manage throughout our time.
As much as we love working in intensive care and how we love the patients and love the team, I think sometimes it's that accumulation of challenging patients and situations that we face that can cause that emotional burden.
Why can it sometimes be difficult for nurses to recognise that they are struggling?
We're very good at recognising deterioration in patients, recognising when they deteriorate, when their blood pressure drops, when they get sick, but we're not very good at recognising it in ourselves.
I And sometimes I think, you know, we just say we're fine, but really, we're unable to kind of explain how we're not fine, really.
So that can often be a tricky thing for nurses to handle, really, why we're not too great at recognising how we're struggling in ourselves.
I think it's very personal and it's very different from individual to individual.
And I don't know if I was intentionally masking, if it was something that I was setting out to do.
So it is clear then that critical care nurses are repeatedly exposed to serious illness, trauma, uncertainty and death.
What emotional impact can this have over time? And why is it important to talk about it openly?
And you could, you know, you could go through weeks of months of being exposed, you know, to really upsetting traumatic stories and you would kind of, you'd cope okay with it, you know, you'd be okay.
You'd feel like you could keep a professional hat on, that maybe it didn't follow you home too much.
And then you'd suddenly hit a week or a day when you struggle with it a lot more.
Whereas maybe there's a particular patient that you care for, a group of patients that just, it feels a lot more personal and suddenly it is affecting you.
I think for me also, you're so used to being exposed to all these potentially quite tragic, quite traumatic stories, it almost starts to normalise a little bit in your brain.
You maybe don't realise that you're being exposed to such an emotional burden because it's just happening all the time and your colleagues are being exposed to something similar and it can start to seem quite normal for you.
And then I think potentially that's when you're more at risk of starting to struggle without maybe realising that you're struggling.
I don't think there's ever one big traumatic event that might cause emotional burden.
I often think it's like an accumulation of lots of things that we witness and we manage throughout our time.
As much as we love working in intensive care and how we love the patients and love the team, I think sometimes it's that accumulation of challenging patients and situations that we face that can cause that emotional burden.
Why can it sometimes be difficult for nurses to recognise that they are struggling?
We're very good at recognising deterioration in patients, recognising when they deteriorate, when their blood pressure drops, when they get sick, but we're not very good at recognising it in ourselves.
I And sometimes I think, you know, we just say we're fine, but really, we're unable to kind of explain how we're not fine, really.
So that can often be a tricky thing for nurses to handle, really, why we're not too great at recognising how we're struggling in ourselves.
I think it's very personal and it's very different from individual to individual.
And I don't know if I was intentionally masking, if it was something that I was setting out to do.
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