Nurses work hard, and need all the support they can get. The under-appreciated backbone of the medical system, nurses usually work between 8 and 12 hours a day, move patients, shift equipment, and walk for thousands of steps every day. Responsible and flexible, nurses also spend dealing with patient mobility, accessibility, and all the paperwork that goes with it.
With all of this, nurses are generally pretty wrecked by the end of each shift. Despite hospitals increasingly aware of how important it is to look after their nursing staff, nurses end up finishing each day tired, stressed and sore-footed.
While we can’t help you with the ‘tired and stressed’ part, we can make some suggestions about the ‘sore-footed’ element of working in Nursing. As any doctor, osteopath, massage therapist or podiatrist will tell you, comfortable footwear is vitally important to your well-being. Humans aren’t designed to stand on hard floors, and doing so in bad shoes is a killer. Your feet will be under enormous amounts of pressure and will feed that stress up your legs and into your spine and back.
Walking and working on sore feet isn’t fun either. So what can you do to make your life easier as a nurse? We’re big fan of the Dansko brand of shoes for nursing professionals. Let’s have a think about what you need.
Durability. Nursing shoes need to be durable. With hard wear and hard hours, nursing shoes are going to be put through their paces in just as tough a fashion as a workman’s boots or a balletist’s slippers. You want your shoes to be tough, to not wear or warp, and to not fall to pieces after the first few 12 hour shifts.
In our experience, Dansko shoes are some of the best in the world for durability. Designed form the ground up with hard work in mind, they’re resilient to sideways slippage, twisting, and abrasion. You can clean them easily if they need it, and ou don’t need to take a softly-softly approach, either. A good pair of Dansko nursing shoes will last you between 12 and 24 months of hard, near-daily use, and many pairs will last even long if you aren’t actively trying to demolish them every working day.
Comfort. Comfortably nursing shoes are bloody hard to come by. For some reason, most designers of women’s professional shoes seem to be unable to combine ‘good-looking’ with ‘not wanting to rip them of your feet at the end of a shift’. Luckily, Dansko nursing shoes are a step in the right direction.
With their sturdy, absorbent cushioning, Dansko shoes give a good amount of support to the heel and arch of the foot, while being soft enough to not stress the bones of the feet with the impact from walking.
The only area that some nurses have an issue with is at the foot of the shoe, if their toes are particularly long or like to curl over themselves, but both of these issues can be easily addressed with a length or two of tape or some band-aids to make everything nice and snug. To get the same level of comfort in other shoes normally requires going up an extra $100-150 per pair – and for that much extra, you might as well buy another pair of Dansko’s and still save yourself some money!
Safety. Working in nursing is a high-OH+S risk environment. Long working hours, dangerous machinery, and the potential for infection and the spreading of biological contaminants means that nurses need to be safe and steady in their work.
Dansko shoes are excellent in terms of stability, non-slippage, and resistance to both hazardous materials and being very cleanable. Nursing is a work environment where there is a high likelihood of liquids or other materials being spilled around one’s feet.
Having a sturdy non-slip grip helps avoid dangerous falls and accidents, but unlike many other safety shoes, the ‘sticky’ grip doesn’t impair normal walking – we’ve tried out all the Dansko nursing shoes, and only noticed an impediment when we’ve gotten carried away and tried to dance in them!
Dansko nursing shoes are made with a sturdy toe guard, but if your OH+S system requires it, you can get a steel toe-cap installed easily. Overall, we rate Dansko nursing shoes to be at the higher end of the safety spectrum when it comes to working shoes.
