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.
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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.
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?