Nursing professionals called it a dramatic example of what can go wrong when healthcare workers don’t get enough sleep.
Boston police said that on the morning of May 17, an officer arriving at Faulkner Hospital saw a white Grand Cherokee badly damaged, part of the Faulkner parking lot guardrail missing from the top floor, and an injured woman being treated by paramedics.
Boston Fire told the officer that somehow the woman had driven the vehicle off the top floor of the garage.
A source told Boston 25 News that an exhausted nurse on duty fell asleep after reversing the car. However, the police report said the woman hit the gas instead of the brake and the car fell out of the driveway head-on. The woman told police she had finished her shift but was on duty from 11 p.m. She decided that instead of going home, she would sleep in her vehicle. At around 1am, she moved to get away from the lights – and that’s when the incident happened.
A Faulkner employee told Boston 25 News that the vehicle landed in a nearby warehouse before crashing into an area with nearby bushes.
Massachusetts Nurses Association spokesman Joe Markman confirmed the driver was a nurse. Although this incident was particularly dramatic, the MNA said it is not uncommon for nurses to be involved in accidents on the way home – due to extreme fatigue caused by long shifts, sometimes mandatory overtime and a lack of adequate help. (It is not known what level of exhaustion this nurse was feeling or her working conditions.)
Rebecca Furst knows all about dealing with fatigue.
She recently retired after more than 40 years as a nurse – most recently at Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
“I really sympathize with the nurse and I can certainly understand how this happened,” Furst said. “I don’t think people realize how exhausting this job is.”
Furst said the public underestimates the physical and emotional toll nurses take just doing their jobs: from transporting heavy patients to the stress of engaging in life-saving procedures to dealing with death.
“I mean, I came home from nights at work with the window open, hitting my face to keep myself awake,” Furst said.
Nurses make up the majority of the U.S. healthcare workforce. But recent studies make it clear that working conditions are affecting these numbers.
In fact, the American College of Nursing recently reported that a quarter of registered nurses plan to leave the profession, in one way or another, within the next five years.
Mass. Gen. Brigham said he is investigating the incident — but could not confirm whether the injured party was an employee, much less a nurse.
Furst said the incident is a wake-up call that some things in nursing need to change.
“It was a 22-mile trip for me when I worked — and I was exhausted,” Furst said. “And you know you don’t want to have an accident. There has to be a different way. There has to be a different way.”
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