Nursus Interrupticus
Saturday, April 28th, 2007See, I’m not alone in my assessment of the great nursing shortage of 2007. I found an interesting entry in a blog, which like a breath of fresh (non-Seattle) air, is discussing the “real” problems in nursing. Not the whiney “oh we just need to train more nurses and then we’ll be fine,” or “all we need is more teachers…” or “we just need to indoctrinate 3 year olds that their only career choice is nurse.”
From the TPMcafe:
Don’t let them fool you. There is no nursing shortage in America. Two million plus nurses is NOT a shortage. There is however, is a shortage of nurses willing to work under the conditions currently being offered by the hospital/healthcare industry/corporations. Nurses joke about it, “Yeah, yeah, lots of nursing jobs are out there. Trouble is they’re all basically the same crappy one!”
A veteran of 20 years of hospital nursing, I was recently talking with a nurse I worked with for years in an ER-Level I Trauma Center in NYC(veterans we are-we worked in ‘the trenches’). She is now doing legal nurse consulting and has cut her time down at the hospital to one per diem day a week, just to keep a hand in it. She says the old ER is like being in hell and I believe it. I’ve been out of hospital/ER work myself for over 2 years now and it was hell when I left. We discussed two other nurses who also left, one to do outpatient radiology at private practice and the other who joined a traveling nurse agency. They, like us, got fed up and got out. And we are not alone. Nurses are leaving hospital work in droves and of those who aren’t, most want to leave.