Sister LeAnn Hamilton – her journey to becoming a professional nurse

By Shane Marks

American nurse theorist and nursing professor, Jean Watson once said that “Nurses are a unique kind. They have this insatiable need to care for others, which is both their greatest strength and fatal flaw.” It is on this thought, that 30-year-old LeAnn Hamilton, an emergency nurse who has eight unbroken years of service can be described.

Sister LeAnn Hamilton sat down with Guyana Times to give us a first-hand look into her eight years of being a professional nurse.
Eight years is a long time in any profession, but this young woman didn’t always want to be a nurse, or so she thought. As a child, Hamilton developed a fondness for animals. So much so that it unsettled her to see them in any form of pain. The young woman had wanted to become a veterinarian.
She said, “I remember I always used to look after these animals, when they would get sick or have wounds or so, I would find myself, as a child, looking after them, bandaging them with whatever, even if it was a little piece of cloth. So, I actually thought I wouldn’t become a veterinarian. On the contrary, I became a nurse.”
But her aspiration was not that far off. She recalled, “When I was in high school, upon completion, I remember two of my friends, we were speaking about professions, we were thinking along the lines of nursing.”

Sister LeAnn, who is a trained Emergency Nurse and acting Ward Manager for the Accident and Emergency Department at the Georgetown Public Hospital Cooperation (GPHC), said that she has always been empathetic towards everything and everyone she met, as a child and now more so has a nurse.
“I always knew I had it in me to just care,” Hamilton said, smiling. She continued, “Caring is definitely within me, not only in the scope of nursing but generally because I believe that treating everybody as one, equally, you need to be impartial, that’s when I knew I wanted to become a nurse.”
It has always been “a passion for me,” she said.
Hamilton is an emergency nurse specialist who was a part of the first batch of nurses who benefited from a training programme offered by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center – a university in Nashville, Tennessee.
She proudly told this publication, “I am actually an emergency nurse specialist. I was a part of the first batch of emergency nurses to be trained.”
The trained nurse explained that the training has helped her learn and hone her skills as a nurse, which in turn helped her to be a better nurse.
“That has helped me so much, this was done with Vanderbilt Hospital, and it has brought out some skills that you didn’t know you could’ve portrayed before. It helped to sharpen your nursing skills. It helped you to give better patient care,” she admitted.
Hamilton has been an emergency nurse since the inception of her nursing career. She said that “Emergency is home – my home, I was birthed here, as a nurse, and I do not regret it.”
“It’s a very beautiful profession,” she said. “It opens your eyes to so much more. I don’t think I would’ve ventured into any other field because it’s a passion for me.”
It is expected, as a nurse of the Accident and Emergency Department, there would’ve, at some point, been a case that Sister LeAnn couldn’t handle. On the contrary, she said that she is still waiting for something to surprise her.
“To be honest, I am still waiting. I am still waiting for something to actually get to me or throw me off balance as a nurse. I am just here for it, the adrenaline rush is there,” she light-heartedly joked. “Nothing has thrown me off-guard yet. Everything that I see just makes me more profound in what I do.”
Nevertheless, she had a hard time separating her work from her personal life at the beginning of her career. She said that she used to dream about the things she witnessed during the day at work. This made her an overthinker in “a bad way,” she said. This took some time to get used to, but now, she is beyond capable of balancing her personal and work life, she admitted.
“It probably made me an overthinker in a bad way, but I juggle life better now. Work is work. You have to have a social life. You have to be able to release your mind and have mental stability. My work actually aids in helping me to be happy because I work, I accomplish whatever goal I wanted to accomplish for the day with the other team members, and you go home and you just relax. That’s what I do now,” she said.

COVID-19 pandemic
Nurses across the world felt the impact of the sudden COVID-19 pandemic more than anyone.
“The two years, when the pandemic started…we did not know what to expect, we had zero clue,” Hamilton said. “We knew what the other parts of the world told us from their experience.
However, though the nurses were faced with the sudden uncertainty of the then-new virus, it did not stop Hamilton and her fellow nurses from caring for their patients. The pandemic even made them more empathic.
“Caring for patients; it did not deter us from giving the care that we know each and every patient needs. It probably made us more empathic because you see so many persons losing their lives.”
The COVID-19 pandemic had caused Hamilton to develop social anxiety because of the isolated lifestyle she had to adapt to.
“Personally, I know have a bit of social anxiety because you’re accustomed to being indoors now, being a couple of feet away from persons when you go to the supermarkets or when you go to any other places.”

Losing patients
Watson’s quote becomes a striking reality when she said nurses have an “insatiable need to care for others, which is both their greatest strength and fatal flaw.”
During her eight years of being a nurse, Hamilton has lost a few patients along the way, and it has taken a toll on her.
“When you do get involved with patients on a daily basis, sometimes, in all honesty, you probably might meet this patient for fifteen minutes or so, working on them, but it might be a child. It gets to you sometimes. We cry for patients we would’ve only known for half an hour,” she sadly said.
Counselling is provided for nurses who may need to deal with their suppressed grief, but “there are some things you need to deal with on your own that you probably would not want to have others know,” Hamilton said.

Not enough nurses
Nurses are vital for the healthcare sector to function at its best, but it is generally known that nurses are not appreciated enough for the hard work and dedication they put into their profession. But Hamilton understands the frustration of persons who may not appreciate the efforts of nurses due to their experiences of long waiting periods to receive medical assistance. She said that this is due to the staggeringly low nurse-to-patient ratio.
“Most times there is a build-up of patients. The nurse-to-patient ratio is way less than it should be because I’m sure everybody knows now, that we’re losing our nurses, we’re short of nurses, so the frustration that patients would portray towards us is because they’re tired, they’re waiting, and I understand that.
“We understand that you’re frustrated, we’re doing our best. Even though it might not show that we’re short (of nurses) because we’re working very tediously every day trying to get everything done in such a short span of time for everybody,” she said.
Recently, it has been brought to the public’s attention that the GPHC may be short staffed – which was pointed out by Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony – due to long waiting periods to receive medical assistance. Hamilton believes this shortage of nurses is a side effect of not enough financial investments into the wages for nurses.
She said, “Finance I think is one of the reasons, it is probably the reason nurses are leaving. They’re looking for betterment…betterment in the way of being paid because the period of time that you are working for decades or just a few years, you got to have foresight, you’re going to be looking into the future saying “I need a house by the time I’m 30.” But, to buy a car on my salary, I probably have to save up to about four years.”
Nurses are the backbone of the healthcare sector and they should be treated with respect. They care for their patients and also for the patient’s family and their colleagues.