West Virginia Nurse - January 2022

January, February, March 2022 West Virginia Nurse Page 9
The leadership of the WV Affiliate of the American
College of Nurse-Midwives (WV-ACNM) is optimistic
about all three of these pending bills because of
the bipartisan cooperation, and overjoyed that the
Protecting Moms Who Served Act is now law.
Back here at home in the Mountain State,
WV-ACNM is grateful to WVNA for promoting
one of our most important “state legislative
agenda” items, the removal of the Certificate of
Need (CON) program. You’ll find that removing
the CON is listed on WVNA’s 2022 legislative
agenda, outlined on p. 1 of this issue of
West Virginia Nurse.
The CON is a clear barrier to opening additional
birth centers in West Virginia. For many years now, WV
has had just one birth center. It is part of FamilyCare
Health Centers and located in Charleston; recently
it moved from Putnam County where it had been
for many years. You can read more about WV CNMs’
concern about the CON Program on p. 9 of the
January 2021 issue of West Virginia Nurse; the link is
here: West Virginia Nurse link from WVNA website.
References
State of West Virginia, Department of Veterans Assistance.
(2018). Annual veterans’ report. https://veterans.
wv.gov/Documents/WVDVA-2018%20Annual%20
Report.pdf
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. (n.d.). State summaries:
Illinois.
https://www.va.gov/vetdata/docs/
SpecialReports/State_Summaries_Illinois.pdf
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. (n.d.-2). State
summaries: Maine. https://www.va.gov/vetdata/docs/
SpecialReports/State_Summaries_Maine.pdf
*******
Editor’s Note: The WV ACNM Affiliate is an
organizational affiliate partner of WVNA. You can read
about this program at WVNA Organizational Affiliate
Partners.
The writer represents the American Association
of Birth Centers (AABC) on the United States
Breastfeeding Committee (USBC), a supporter of the
PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act.
National Legislative Updates
(Focused on Nurses and Nurse Practitioners)
Jodi Biller, MSN, APRN, FNP-C
WVNA Health Policy & Legislative Committee
Co-Chair
After months of negotiations, on November 19, 2021,
the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 5376, the
“Build Back Better Act,” by a vote of 220 to 213, with
all House Democrats except one (Rep. Jared Golden
of Maine) voting in favor of the bill, and all House
Republicans voting against the bill.
The legislation has now moved on to the U.S. Senate.
As WV Nurse is going to press, the legislation is not
moving forward.
By the time this edition of West Virginia Nurse is in
your hands or on your phones, matters could look
different. While the over 2,000-page bill encompasses
many policy areas, I want to showcase several key
health care-related provisions directly related to
practice. I am grateful to the American Association
of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) for the summary.
Specifically, Build Back Better would:
• Create a new hearing benefit under Medicare
Part B, beginning January 1, 2023, for hearing aids
for individuals with moderately severe, severe,
or profound hearing loss in one or both ears.
Eligibility is once every five years, if furnished
through a written order by a physician, qualified
audiologist, qualified hearing aid professional,
physician assistant, nurse practitioner, or clinical
nurse specialist qualified to write such order by
the state.
• Provide $50 million for Health and Human
Services (HHS) to conduct studies on the
appropriateness of establishing minimum nursing
staff-to-resident ratios in skilled nursing facilities
(SNFs).
• Provide $2 billion in funding for the National
Health Service Corps (NHSC). Nurse practitioners
(NPs) are the second largest provider group in
Real Talk About Burnout
Bree Becker, MSN, NP-C, RNC-MNN
bbecker@wematchwell.com
Reprinted with permission from
Georgia Nursing April 2021 issue
Recently I was putting my son to bed. We read one of my
favorite children’s books, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.
Despite reading this story many times, I was struck by the
visceral sadness of the tale. It’s a children’s story with a simple
plot. A boy is climbing a tree (personified as a woman),
and he happily swings from her branches, devouring her
apples and enjoying all the comfort the tree provides.
Readers follow the boy on his journey through adolescence,
adulthood, and then as a tired elderly man. Throughout his
life, the boy takes, and the tree gives. Whatever his needs are
at each stage of his life, the tree is happy to provide a piece
of herself to help. She gives her branches for shade, then
her wood to help build a house. Finally, with her resources
depleted, she dwindles to a stump. And even then, she
manages to provide a place for the boy, who is now an
elderly man, to sit.
I realized the tree’s exhausted state represents how
many nurses feel. For us, The Giving Tree is an all-too-familiar
story. The depleted tree personifies the exhaustion and
burnout most of us are experiencing today. I receive daily
articles that reference burnout and company ads that offer
a solution specifically for me. But at the end of the day,
the responsibility of executing the proposed solution falls
back on me. “Here is something else for you to do to help
you with your burnout.” Burnout was identified as an issue
decades ago, and is only getting worse. Despite public
awareness, nurses are still being asked to do more with less.
The pandemic highlighted nurses’ struggle with the mental
and physical toll of the job. Instead of offering a cliched
intervention for burnout, I want to have a real conversation.
Let’s ask hard questions. Let’s stop pretending we know how
to fix a problem that’s plagued us for decades.
My personal problem with many of the resources
designed to address burnout is that it creates more work for
me. Now don’t get me wrong, I like learning about yoga and
I actually believe things like exercise and diet have a positive
effect on your mental health. But the reason I feel exhausted
as a nurse is not because I don’t exercise or eat healthy. I
have always adopted a healthy lifestyle even before I was a
nurse. I do think that my healthy lifestyle allowed me to push
myself physically and mentally as a nurse. The long hours,
constant stress, and erratic schedule didn’t catch up with me
for a decade. But I eventually burned out. And no amount
of green smoothies or yoga could cure me. I found myself
becoming overly cynical, feeling like I was not making an
impact, and dreading work.
Burnout is the symptom of a larger disease: it’s the
result of poor processes within institutions and the larger
healthcare system overall. Nurses experienced burnout long
before this pandemic. The pandemic has only cast a light on
an ugly truth most of us have been aware of for a long time.
If burnout is not the health care worker’s problem alone to
solve, who is responsible for solving it?
Here are real problems, I don’t have the answers. But
I know we are too fragile to continue this way. Last year,
I was clueless about the horror the world was about to
experience due to COVID. While I knew our medical system
was broken and that health care workers were being
stretched beyond capacity, I didn’t realize what a pandemic
would do to our profession. I didn’t realize how vulnerable
we are. The future is now. The what-ifs and maybes are
reality. We can’t afford to hobble along anymore. We have
to be willing to talk about the real issues and the first step is
asking hard questions.
I know I can’t fix this today and I know I can’t fix this
alone. To me, it’s a fight worth fighting. And maybe, by the
time I retire, nurses won’t suffer the way I’ve seen my peers
suffer over the last decade. And maybe, unlike The Giving
Tree, nurses won’t give until we are depleted and we will be
empowered to care for ourselves the way we care for others.
Photo courtesy Architect of the Capitol
that program, ranking behind behavioral and
mental health providers.
• Provide $500 million in funding for the Nurse
Corps, which includes funding for NPs.
• Provide $500 million in funding to enhance and
modernize nursing education programs and
increase the number of faculty and students,
particularly in underserved areas. This provision
is based on the Future Advancement of Academic
Nursing Act (FAAN Act), S. 246, which AANP
supports. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon is the
lead sponsor.
• Provide $25 million in funding to support training
of health professionals in palliative and hospice
care, foster patient and family engagement,
integration of palliative and hospice care with
primary care and other appropriate specialties,
and collaboration with community partners to
address gaps in health care for individuals in need
of palliative or hospice care.
• Includes $20 million in funding to nursing
schools, health care facilities, programs leading
to certification, partnerships of such schools and
facilities, and programs and initiatives to develop
and implement programs to train and educate
individuals in palliative care in educational, hospital,
hospice, home, or long-term care settings.
You can read more about the framework of Build
Back Better at White House Build Back Better.
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