Rising Drug and Substance Abuse Problem Among Nurse Professionals

Substance Abuse Article Critique
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Introduction
Arble and colleagues (2023) recognize the negative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on nurses' health outcomes globally. Work-related stress negatively undermines nurses' physical and emotional wellbeing and is attributed to deteriorated coping behavior, including substance abuse, which could disorient their cognitive functioning. The relationship between traumatic or stressful events and drug abuse inclinations among nurses is well-established in scholarly research. This article investigates whether the rising drug and substance abuse problem among nurse professionals in the United States (U.S.), especially amid the Covid-19 pandemic, was linked to greater work-related cognitive failure. This paper provides a summary and critiques Arble et al.'s (2023) study to derive insights that can be applied in nursing practice and research in the future.
Article Summary
The study is anchored on the premise that nursing is an increasingly complex and demanding profession, which increases the risk of work-related stress among nurses. In this context, the researchers used a cross-sectional quantitative technique on nurses from professional nursing entities to conduct this study. The snowball recruitment approach was used to select nurses. The critical measures for data collection included patient health questionnaire-9, generalized anxiety disorder-7, PTSD checklist, sleep and stress quality, work-related burnout, secondary trauma, and workplace cognitive failure scale. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS-28 software. The authors assert that job stress is a precondition for "cognitive failure" or rather problems in memory, action, and perception. There was a possible connection between nurses' cognitive failure and productivity, especially during the Covid-19 crisis. The authors also established a potential concern for substance abuse among nurses due to rising traumatic exposures and strains in the course of their executing their professional mandate (Arble et al., 2023). Statistics indicate that roughly 5 to 20 percent of nurses struggle with substance use disorder (Cox, 2022). In this context, it is increasingly infeasible to downplay the rising substance abuse crisis and how it affects people globally, including nurse professionals.
The results indicated that nurses recorded increased drug abuse amid the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, nurses who engaged in substance use behaviors experienced higher cognitive failure levels compared to the control cluster. The study stated that the explicit impact of increased drug abuse inclinations on nurses' cognitive wellbeing did not meet statistically significant thresholds, notwithstanding the mediating variables (Arble et al., 2023). Nevertheless, the findings can inform nursing practice by allowing nurse leaders to examine stressors and plan effectively to mitigate these factors. This evidence can also be used to design educational programs for community stakeholders to ensure they are conversant with the stressful nature of nursing practice and ultimately augment nurses' life quality ...