Posted on 04/19/2023 6:29:40 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
MADISON, Wis. -- Experts say a crisis looms in healthcare as hundreds of thousands of nurses plan to exit the workforce within the next few years.
We're used to hearing about staffing shortages since the beginning of the pandemic, but a report by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing puts it into stark perspective.
Roughly 800,000 registered nurses reported an intent to leave the nursing profession by 2027. 188,962 of them are under the age of 40.
"A lot of nurses quit in the first year of starting," but John Friberg said he's not one of them.
"I don't really see myself going anywhere for a while," the UW Health nurse said -- a fact he largely owes to the hospital's Nursing Residency he just completed last month.
"I think a big part is like the skills and being able to ease into being a nurse, but a lot of it is having people there to support you," Friberg said.
The 12-month program is one of 47 in the country, and UW has been a part of it since 2004.
"The best way we can impact that [shortage] is to keep them in the profession, and so that's where having a program that understand their needs and to support them is very very important," Kim McPhee, the program's manager, said.
Residents learn clinical skills with existing nurses and take a different class with a group of their peers every month.
"Many nursing schools had to change dramatically during the pandemic and they weren't able to have hands on skills the way that nurses are typically prepared and so we wanted to kind of overcome that gap," McPhee said.
Last year the hospital hired 200 nurses, and so far this year 54 have been hired to start their residency between February and March.
According to McPhee, they've had to adapt not just the training, but support systems for the soon-to-be nurses.
"I think we've seen more anxiety less confidence in their skills," she said.
Friberg recalled what was running through his mind at the beginning of his residency: "You're thinking like, 'Oh my gosh, how am I ever going to get to a point where I'm going to be a nurse like on my own without having anyone watch over me?'"
It goes without saying, it's a hard job that's causing stress, early retirement, and burnout.
"Right now I'm working on the burn unit," Friberg said. "There are things in other floors I'd be, like, 'Woah, that's way too intense for me,' but I'm perfectly happy with doing, like, hours of wound care."
"There's always going to be things that are challenging but you're learning everyday," the nurse said.
The pandemic has exacerbated a shortage of thousands of nurses "for the first time in over a decade in Wisconsin," Ann Zenk said.
Zenk is the president of the Wisconsin Hospital Association and joined News 3 Now's For the Record on Sunday.
"Nurses have really broad and in-depth training so they can fill a lot of roles in the healthcare team so when there's a shortage we really feel that impact in terms of access, in terms of needing to pursue creative strategies to make sure that we have staff at every bedside that's needed," she said.
And it's been trickling down to patients as a result -- longer wait times, less hospital bed availability -- and will get worse if employers don't make some serious changes, Zenk said.
"Meet some of the highest needs that our multigenerational workforce of today has," she said, "meaningful work, opportunity for advancement."
"'Right now I'm working on the burn unit,' Friberg said. 'There are things in other floors I'd be, like, 'Woah, that's way too intense for me,' but I'm perfectly happy with doing, like, hours of wound care.'"
It's nice that Spicoli straightened out and went into nursing!
Given MSM is constantly going-on about “the nursing shortage” - given that most of our media is just spin, narrative, and propaganda, one has to ask:
Is there really a shortage of nurses in America?
Or is there relatively more demand than before?
Are fewer people choosing nursing as a career?
Are there regulatory reasons that are either limiting supply, or using up available nurses in jobs others could do?
I do not know the answers. I just know that corrupt media doesn’t tell the truth and certainly doesn’t do proper analysis to any issue.
I’ve noticed that a lot of ‘nurses’ in our local FL hospitals are from the Caribbean.................
Good questions.
Anecdotal evidence, is that there is more demand than before, as baby boomers age, as older people are the biggest population found in hospitals and nursing homes. Increasing population of older folks will translate into greater demand for medical personnel, including nurses.
I’ve heard that the women’s movement has steered some women away from nursing, because in this modern age, where women can be astronauts or anything else, fewer will choose nursing.
Yes I know men are nurses too, but less than 10% of registered nurses are men, so the biggest source of nurse recruitment would still be among women.
I’m a guy who got went to night school and earned a LPN license while helping take care of my Dad who had severe dementia for the last 8 years of his life. Most hospitals require an RN license to work there. I’ve tried to find an LPN to RN training program, and even though I have another degree , IV certification, ( and worked as an Aerospace and Medical manufacturing engineer most of my life) , they require about 1 and a 1/2 years of prerequisites before allowing you to enter the program, instead of having these classes sequenced as part of the program. Now if you just want admittance to the RN program they have a point system weighted to SAT scores, community service, and other things that someone who planned for a Nursing career just leaving HS would meet the criteria for. In the outside the hospital industry, it’s heavily LPN’s with one RN supervisor to about 10-20 LPN’s. The RN reviews charting and updates the care plans as doctors orders come in. It’s the RN community that has lobbied in many states to eliminate LPN’s ( Licensed Practical Nurses = low paid nurses). Keep the high paid jobs for nurses who have gone through the current university system. Much like engineering did for the PE ( professional engineering license) which used to be open to anyone who could pass the old exhaustive test which stressed real world problems. The new test looks like the same problems in the college textbooks.Now you must have a degree from an accredited University. It’s not what you know, it’s who you have taken courses from. The RN testing is the same way. If you have just graduated you should be able to pass it, and if you don’t on the first try, you can come back again. The professional society scam.
“Way too intense for me”.
DO ANY people under 35 today know how to actually WORK????
One of our Madison hospitals is trying to Unionize the Nursing staff. (Meriter, I think?)
It’s not going very well for them. Couldn’t even gain any traction during Covid, which was what started it all in the first place.
We have a Cardiac Nurse and a Pharmacist in the family. We’re set. ;)
As a Vet, I use the VA Hospital for my medical care; so far, so good. Have had great doctors and nurses and they run a tight ship.
I never understood the reason why the push for BSN over LPN and Associate degree RN. Part of it is nursing leaders advocating for that, plus the hospitals wanting to have magnet status. I remember nursing in the 80s. It was team nursing with RNs supervising LPNs. That all went away when primary nursing became the focus.
The nursing shortage is a multitude of factors. They are
1. Stress
2. Deliberate short staffing for years
3. Lack of respect by patients and administrators
4. Violence by patients
5. 12 hour shifts on your feet with no breaks excludes older workers because they cannot do that anymore
6. Boomer retirements accelerated during covid
7. Bad treatment to nurses by hospitals during covid- Lack of PPE, staffing shortages, watching people die constantly, no security if you got covid from a patient because covid contracted on the job did not allow you to receive workmen’s compensation
8. Nurses gravitated to travel nursing jobs because it paid more and they had contractually more say in their working conditions. That resulted in even more nurses leaving their job to travel because the pay differences for the same job caused anger with nurses who still remained employed by a hospital.
9. Too few nursing schools because professors got paid less than a floor nurse
10. Too few staff in nursing homes because they all quit ,too. Conditions in nursing homes are horrible. That caused backups in hospitals unable to discharge patients to nursing homes.
11. Staff shortages in hospitals during covid resulted in new nursing school graduates to be thrown out there with little training causing burnout early and they quit the profession
Its not the vaccine causing this. The main issue is short staffing done by hospital administrators over many years. When covid hit, the underlying problems became insurmountable.
.
2 of my daughters WERE RN’s in hospitals. They found other opportunities.
I’ll add to your list.
12. Patient to nurse ratio is 14-16 patients to one nurse for every 12 hour shift.
13. God-complex doctors who think nurses aren’t worth their time. Doctors might talk to the nurses about their patients, most likely not.
14. Nurses are responsible for anything that goes wrong, even if it is doctor caused. Their license can be pulled for the errors of the doctors.
As with medicine, there is (and always has been) a conflict between academics and practitioners, which plays out as fights over the balance between theoretical training and practical training.
In medical schools (which I know well), the academics have been gaining ground for forty years and the practitioners have almost completely been driven from the battlefield. I have been told that the nursing schools that confer the BSN degree have had much the same story, but I don’t have intimate knowledge of the inside workings of those schools the way I do medical schools.
Interesting. Please clarify. What's the practical consequence of that?
Raising up and promoting those who do research, get Fed.gov money, get patents, get rich in biotech? Vs. getting doctors to work in Emergency rooms?
There are plenty of registered nurses in the U.S. I am one of them. I refuse to do the job.
I was treated like an assembly line worker but the worst part was being pulled from my regular unit to another unit outside of my experience. Not only is it stressful to be in an unfamiliar unit but I would arrive 20 to 30 minutes late. People’s lives are put in danger every time this happens. Very, very stressful!
I started looking for a different type of work a few years after graduating from nursing school. I now have a doctorate in another health profession. This profession allowed total control over my clinical practice. I am now retired after a long successful career.
Good for you! I retired early. The risk was too great for me to stay. My husband and I have accumulated a lot of assets. A lawsuit as a result of short staffing would have put our financial security at risk, even with malpractice insurance. Its a toxic job.
Every doctor who retires at 65 needs two - three 30 year olds to replace him.
Not sustainable.
Remember the nurse who was arrested for obstruction by a policeman who wanted blood drawn from an unconscious man? She refused to draw blood without patient consent, an arrest, or a warrant. The YouTube video of the event was rather brutal.
The really bad part of this was that there was an agreement between the hospital and the police, and the cop didn’t abide by that agreement.
That nurse stood her ground. Good for her. She later God a very large settlement from the city; well into the upper six figures.
You mean just like attorneys?
Thanks for the reply, I have seen the system as an advocate for my dad, who the VA helped because of his Korean War combat veteran experience. ( machinist mate on an APA, helmed an LCM as his other job), his time in assisted living, then his time in memory care and finally in a SNF. I could see the difference in how patients were treated according to how often family members checked on them. I’m retired from engineering but currently fill in on weekends doing pediatric outpatient work. I have 5 granddaughters and treat my patients like I’d like my granddaughters treated if they were in the same situation. I also thank God my granddaughters are healthy. In manufacturing, a good team works wonders. a boss has one brain (sometimes) and two eyes. My team had 20 brains and forty eyes. Wanna take a guess at our success rate at delivering prototype hardware on time and under budget?
Exactly, although I hate to compare any human being to an attorney.
Thanks for your service. Like every Vet, the nation owes you for being a responsible human being willing to put yourself on the line for the citizens of America. Hand Salute.
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