Our campaign
A multi-platform effort built to make the evidence on burnout something nurses can actually use — not another slide deck, but content people save, act on, and pass along.
Where the campaign lives
TikTok
@nurses_unpluggedShort-form video for early-adopter nurses and nursing students.
Reels alongside infographics and written posts.
Substack
@nursesunpluggedLong-form writing aimed at managers, educators, and policymakers.
Linktree
FightNursingBurnoutEvery platform plus advocacy resources in one hub.
Four things we keep coming back to
Every post ties back to one of these, which keeps the feed from sliding into generic wellness content nobody remembers by Tuesday.
Off-shift recovery
How to actually detach once a shift ends, plus sleep and scheduling content — both proven to keep exhaustion from following nurses home (Al-Hammouri et al., 2025; Cho et al., 2025).
Inner resources
Content on hope, self-efficacy, resilience, and optimism (Luthans et al., 2007) — one useful lever, never sold as the whole fix (Orgambídez et al., 2025).
Leaning on each other
Cho et al. (2025) found that nurses with strong team ties detach more fully on breaks and after shifts — teamwork content is really recovery content in disguise.
Pushing for structural change
Templates and plain-language guides for lobbying on wages, staffing ratios, and stable funding — the three levers the retention research keeps circling back to (Muir et al., 2025; Nguyen & Bochnak, 2024; Smith et al., 2025).
We hold the line on that last pillar deliberately. Christianson et al. (2025) point out a real risk in resilience-only messaging: presented alone, it can start to sound like burnout is something a nurse failed to prevent, rather than a symptom of a system asking too much of too few people.
Posting schedule
Weekly: one short-form post, split between Instagram Reels and TikTok.
Monthly: one long-form Substack piece, timed to coincide with policy windows.
Tags we post with
Who we're reaching, and how
Different audiences need different formats, and Rogers' (2003) Diffusion of Innovations theory is why we don't treat every platform the same. Nurses and nursing students find us first, through 60–90 second clips on TikTok and Instagram covering lived experience and weekly challenges. From there, the Substack pieces reach further up the chain — nurse managers, educators, policymakers — the people with an actual hand on the levers that could change staffing and pay.
How we know if it's working
We're early enough in this that the honest answer includes more than a spreadsheet. Right now, "working" partly means whether nurses feel like they can talk about burnout here without it being turned into a punchline — the metrics below are the other half of that picture.
| Metric | What it tells us |
|---|---|
| Reach & impressions | Whether the content is finding nurses beyond our existing network |
| Engagement (likes, saves, shares, comments) | Whether the content resonates enough to act on or pass along |
| Weekly challenge completion rate | Whether recovery content translates into actual behavior change |
| Click-through on advocacy CTAs | Willingness to move from reading to acting |
| MPP letter template downloads | Direct measure of policy-advocacy uptake |
| Substack article views | Reach into the manager/policymaker audience |
| Reshares by partner organizations | Credibility signal from ONA, RNAO, and Ontario Health Coalition |
Ongoing reflection and feedback guide small adjustments throughout — this isn't a set-it-and-forget-it campaign.
Get involved
Follow the campaign, complete a weekly challenge, or download an MPP letter template.