(AUDIO) Lauren Van Vlear

Lauren Van Vlear, who has been a registered nurse in the emergency room at St. Joseph Hospital for three years, normally loves her job. She loves helping people and she likes working hard and being busy.

Van Vlear in her PPE

But over the last couple of years, with the COVID pandemic, a sharp increase in patients dealing with mental health issues and a resulting uptick in violence toward medical staff, the environment in the ER has just become too much to handle.

On this week’s episode of Humboldt Holding Up — the Outpost‘s podcast spawned from the weirdness of COVID — Van Vlear joins us to discuss her experience with the chaotic environment in the ER, the troubling situation with patients being taken to the hospital on a 5150 hold, some of the frightening situations she has witnessed and why she has recently decided to transfer to a different department to prioritize her own mental health.

Click the audio player above or head over to Apple Podcasts to hear Van Vlears’s chat with LoCO’s Stephanie McGeary and Andrew Goff and/or scroll our list of past guests below.

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