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.
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