The Nursing Crisis Has Arrived. Stat!
The next time you’re in a hospital – hopefully as a visitor – watch the nurses as they interact with Uncle Stanley, you and his family, the residents and other physicians, the pharmacy, the therapists, housekeeping and dining services. It quickly becomes obvious that it is nurses who make things work.
That makes the crisis in American nursing all the more disturbing.
Unlike the U.S.’s crumbling highway and bridge infrastructure, this crisis gets precious little attention because nurses usually aren’t a complaining sort and few are organized, let alone unionized, and really don’t have a voice. This includes a voice in the ongoing debate about what to do about American’s ailing health-care system. Yes, the one that nurses make work.
The crisis in nursing is playing out one nurse and one hospital at a time, a kind of slow-motion Hurricane Katrina as older and more experienced nurses leave the profession.
A study on nurses in New Jersey by the Collaborative Center for Nursing paints a frightening portrait of this vital profession in a state of 8.7 million people that is sandwiched between two major metropolitan areas.
If “frightening” seems too strong a word, consider the study’s key findings.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.
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16 Responses to “The Nursing Crisis Has Arrived. Stat!”
Hmm, when I graduate in 2009 perhaps I ought to move to New Jersey….
Actually, there are some signs of hope. An enrollment increase in nursing schools has reduced the vacancy rate, especially in the Northeast, though it’s still bad in the South and Southwest.(Though with an aging general population and an aging nurse population this relief will only be temporary). And the national shortfall by 2020 will only be 340,000 instead of the 750,000 orignally predicted. Though 340,000 vacancies is still pretty bad, especially considering that nurses are doing more of what doctors did a generation ago (and there are signs than we may be short doctors as well).
No easy solutions there, although an easy job search for me…
The problem with the report is that it was written by the staff at nursing schools and its recommendations are to spend a lot more money on nursing schools. The conflict of interests inherent to the report are huge.
However, there are many reaons why nursing shortages occur that will not be fixed by expanding nurse training programs. If you raise nursing pay at hospitals, the everyone elses pay has to go up. There are many things that make the working conditions bad that cannot be fixed.
One of the unsaid problems is that white, middle class American has abandoned nursing (and healthcare in general) as a career field. The middle class white women growing up in New Jersey have so many opportunities. The last thing they will want to do is become an inpatient nurse in a hospital where they will be one of the few whites in the work force.
WOW! Double WOW! So basically SD, white women in New Jersey will only work as nurses where there’s a substantial white workforce? Seems like your insulting white women SD. As a “colored man” (term used for giggles), I have always worked where there was little to no “colored” workforce. Didn’t have a choice and I made out just fine. I think the nursing issue in New Jersey (as well as other places) has more to do with what Shaun’s talking about than white womens’ skittishness about working around the “coloreds”.
If you look at customer satisfaction ratings for hospitals in the great Washington, DC area, you will find that Winchester Medical Center in Winchester, Virginia has by far the highest customer satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, it is the hospital with the whitest workforce. If you look at the hospitals that are going broke they are Prince Georges Hospital Center and Greater Southeast who virtually no whites in their workforce.
And it is not about working around coloreds as much as hispanics, filipinos, koreans, iranians, Russians, etc.
Working as most large impatient medical centers is like living in the bowling alone world of Robert Putnam.
SD:
Blogging on a wide range of subjects, as I do, reminds me of Will Rogers’ famous remark to the effect that he knew a little bit about everything and nothing about anything.
I sometimes feel that way myself, so I normally would be sympathetic to your comments in reply to my post.
But unfortunately for you, I know the health-care industry and covered it for many years. I continue to follow it closely. I know nursing. I know a solid study when I see one, especially one that uses well-tested and controlled survey methodology applied to police officers and firefighters to ascertain what constitutes burnout.
So I can say without fear of exaggeration that your comments are utterly inaccurate to the point of being inane.
Shaun,
Here are the six recommendations of the report. Five of them directly benefit the authors of the study. Recommendation no. five does not benefit the authors but is the type of program that college professors love to be involved in and increases their visibility to get on accreditation boards and committees.
Recommendation #1: Expand enrollment capacity for generic RN students by increasing State support to New Jersey schools of nursing.
Recommendation #2: Recruit and retain nursing faculty by subsidizing nursing faculty salaries commensurate with other employers of nurses with graduate education.
Recommendation #3: Increase the pool of qualified nursing faculty by providing incentives for employers and employees to support those enrolled in master’s degree nursing programs and doctoral level education.
Recommendation #4: Offer grants to New Jersey health care facilities to seek, receive, and actively maintain accreditation for excellence in nursing from the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Magnet Recognition Program®.
Recommendation #5: Supply grants to health care employers to implement work-study programs that offer flexible part-time hours with full-time salary and health care benefits to employees enrolled in RN programs in schools of nursing
Recommendation #6: Allocate a dedicated line of funding within the annual State budget, or a Department thereof, to provide operating funds for the Center to maintain and sustain the Center’s legislative mandates
For a nurse currently working and struggling with the job, none of the recommendations benefit them directly but the recommendations directly benefit the authors.
SD:
This will be it for me and you because I’ve got more important fish to fry.
The fact that the findings may “benefit” the finders has jack sh*t to do with the situation. Any improvement in a system on the verge of collapse will of course benefit the finders. Your point? There is no point.
SD finds racist issues in this issue, I’m shocked. Over in Detroit the falling dollar is sending Ontario nurses back to Windsor, not the Gooks and Spades. SD Hows things over at V-Dare?
Shawn,
If you did not have personnel connections with
nursing you would probably be much more suspect of the report. Of course, there is a limit to what a state government can do. If it trains more nurses, there is no gaurantee that they will stay in New Jersey.
Rudi,
All you have to do is walk around the medical center with the trauama ER in any large city to see how diversity affect healthcare. Oncology can no longer depend on verbal communications between providers and patients because, in too many situations, both are operating in English as a second language. There was a national incident in Houston where between the Korean Physician, the Nigerian nurse, and the Hispanic Patients, they repeatly gave chemo-therapy patients to the wrong individuals.
Another example of how nursing conflicts with the diversity of a hospital, if housekeeping, maintenance, and supply are unionized, the nurses will almost never vote for a union. But if the nurses are the first ones to organize, the blue collar workers will follow. It is believe that if blue collar workers unionize first, then being in a union is seen as low class.
If you want to entertain yourself, try looking up Press-ganey or other patient satisfaction scores. The smaller hospitals in the upper midwest and new Englang do the best. Patient Satisfaction correlates highly with employee satisfaction.
Add nurses to the
>doctor shortage
>teacher shortage
>scientist shortage
There is something wrong with this picture.
SD-
The preoccupation with race in your comments on all threads has passed from offensive to boring.
domajot,
The teacher shortage is very similar to the nurse shortage in that many people are trained as teachers/nurses but that many quit the field after a very short time. One of the reasons that teachers/nurses quit is the working conditions, the lack of support when on th ejob, and the low pay. Of course, the self-serving report about nursing in NJ does nothing to address the working conditions,nurses pay, or lack of on-the-job support.
However, ignoring working conditions and ignoring the rapidly changing demographics of nurses and how it affects people’s desire to work in the field is just political correctness getting in the way.
“There is something wrong with this picture.”
Not wrong, but missing. Pls add the lawyer surplus, the real estate agent surplus and the lobbyist surplus to get
the whole thing!
“However, ignoring working conditions and ignoring the rapidly changing demographics of nurses and how it affects people’s desire to work in the field is just political correctness getting in the way.”
Sry, I don’t get it. Who ignored those points? Shaun’s story covered those. And what has PC to do with this? Imho the ethnical background of the nurses isn’t the problem here.
Gray’s post number 13 is definitely something I can agree with. Nurses have ungodly hours if you have a family. Teachers aren’t much better off. You’d better be a real morning person if you think you’d like to teach high school as well as not minding long hours by the time everything you must do outside of the classroom gets done. Real science is a discipline that needs a base of knowledge that we don’t really encourage our youngsters to acquire.
In a way it all relates to the fact that we need a much more radical restructuring of our educational system than I’ve seen anyone suggest. And no, that doesn’t mean privatizing them, issuing vouchers or pushing for more charter schools. Not one of those has really moved in the direction I think we need to go.
1. “Stat!” This is laughable misuse of the word.
2. The “crisis in nursing” (set of problems with the profession) is not a crisis nor is it any surprise; it has long been known.
3. The demographic wave of the future can be glimpsed here — and notice that some of these areas were the way they are for a long time (if you have lived or traveled there, you know). No surprises, really.
[click on picture on page to enlarge it]
4. The nursing complaints are about working conditions (OK, exploited by the nursing organization, which naturally wants more money for nurses and nursing schools here in the USA) and, if “native” nurses were asked, exploitation of nurses that includes bringing in health care workers from other nations. (The PC crowd is ridiculously pro-immigrant, as we have seen time after time.) It’s just another case of exploitation of immigrants, as in other lines of work.
ANA comments here (immigrants), here (overtime); news on immigration and nurses here, (immigration bill and nurses here), here,
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