Shala Sommerville had no military background when she started her undergraduate nursing clinicals at the VA. But something about caring for veterans resonated with her in a way other rotations hadn’t.
“I recognized that while they’re an incredibly strong group of people and they’ve done so much, they’ve also been exposed to a lot of stressors and have unique vulnerabilities,” she says.
Years later, working in primary care at the Golden VA, she made another discovery: the nurses caring for these veterans were experiencing their own kind of battle fatigue. And no one was talking about it.
Finding Purpose in Veteran Care
Sommerville started her career in the ICU at UCHealth before moving to primary care at the Golden VA, where she found deep satisfaction in helping veterans navigate the complex VA system.
“One of the things I enjoy most about my job is helping veterans make sure they have access to the care they need,” she says. “I help them navigate the VA system because it’s really hard. I want to make sure they get the best care so they can have the best outcomes. It’s something I find very rewarding.”
Sommerville realized she wanted to do more to help veterans and their care through quality improvement projects. That’s why she’s about to graduate with her MS in Nursing with a Veteran and Military Health Care specialty from the University of Colorado Anschutz College of Nursing.
“I wanted to expand my reach and find ways to really improve the care we’re delivering to these veterans,” she says. “We as nurses need to deliver the right care for the right patient at the right time and make sure our patients have good outcomes. If we improve processes we use to deliver care, we can usually improve outcomes as well.”
Recognizing the Warning Signs
One way Sommerville wants to improve patient care is by focusing on the well-being of nurses and other healthcare workers.
“I want the people I work with to have good personal, physical, and mental health. It’s something I care deeply about,” she says. “I also care deeply about patient outcomes – and I can see directly how having a compromised staff really affects that.”
Sommerville experienced burnout while working in the ICU during the COVID-19 pandemic, and started experiencing it again last year.
“I started to notice signs of burnout in myself, and I realized ‘I’ve been through this before’,” she says. “I realized we do a disservice to healthcare workers when we talk about things in isolation. We might talk about burnout, compassion fatigue, or moral distress…but we don’t talk about them together.”
After talking to her co-workers, she discovered they were feeling the same way.
“We know burnout has physical and mental health effects on our healthcare workers. It affects the healthcare system and, in turn, it means our patients have worse outcomes,” she says.
She says federal healthcare workers experience burnout (like many other nurses) through things like stress from an organizational level, downsizing, a low sense of worth, verbal or physical aggression, and inflexible hierarchies.
“All of these things accumulate, and it’s a difficult load to carry,” she says.
A Grassroots Solution
Sommerville’s goal is to change how burnout is viewed and treated.
“Federal healthcare workers have faced certain vulnerabilities and stressors for a long time, but we haven’t addressed them in a meaningful way,” she says.
Sommerville started a pilot project at the Golden VA, where nurses spend an hour a week for three weeks on an activity focused on self-care. One week it was yoga, another week it was a mindfulness intervention. She’s also advocating for stress and burnout screenings, plus more education and resources, including free interventions offered during work hours.
“Hospitals need to take ownership,” she says. “Burnout isn’t an individual program or a nursing problem. It’s a human problem. It not only affects healthcare providers who are delivering care, but it affects any person who comes in to receive any sort of medical care.”
Her goal is to have her project implemented permanently at the Golden VA, with the hopes of it expanding throughout the whole VA system.
“I want to have processes in place so we can manage this in a meaningful way. You don’t have to be a leader or manager to implement this. This can be a grassroots effort that anybody can do, so we can have a healthier workforce and better patient outcomes,” she says. “What I want to do is improve the professional and personal quality of life of healthcare workers while trying to improve patient outcomes.”
