nabeepchen

This report is from 2001, but the stats haven’t changed and neither have working conditions.

From Elderweb.com:

The Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (FNHP) commissioned Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., to conduct a study among current direct care nurses and former direct care nurses to examine their perspectives on the nursing profession. Seven in ten current nurses say that their facility has a major or moderate problem retaining and recruiting qualified nurses, with more than two in five saying that each is a major problem. 50% of current nurses say that they have considered leaving the patient care field for reasons other than retirement in the last two years. They report that the health care profession faces a serious risk of losing one in five current nurses (21%) from the direct patient care setting for reasons other than retirement.

Isn’t that interesting? And here our experts and talking heads keep telling us that all we need do is simply mass produce more nurses. Train nurses on robo dummies, cut the length of nursing trains, do anything possible to pump more into the system.

The two most-often cited improvements that nurses would like to see are increased staffing levels and higher salaries. Three in four potential leavers say that they would consider continuing in patient care for longer if conditions at their job improved.

So you see, the nursing shortage could be solved almost overnight if hospitals would stop farting around. If they really made concrete changes, a lot of nurses would return. There are about 150,000 nurses working full time at non-nurse jobs. That doesn’t include the number who work part time, or who may have gone back to school, or who may be engaging in other activities like starting up a business or working as a freelance writer. There are 2.8 million RNs in this country, and we don’t have enough?