This article had promise, I thought. Finally, a story in the standard media that was actually going to say something different. Afterall, read this line:

An investigation into the shortage of nurses begins in nursing school.

I thought, finally, exposure of the archaic methods, the lack of meaningful and real life information, the crazed power hungry quadruple PhD professors who last touched a patient during the Korean War….and surely the article would discuss the high attrition rates, how many students are entering nursing because they’re told its a “good profession” with a lot of “opportunity,” but have no idea that they are actually going to have to wipe a sick old man’s butt or watch a 10 year old puke up blood…

WRONG! The article is one of those experiments that tries to see just how low the public IQ is.

From WMTW.com:

Anyone who has been treated in a hospital knows that nurses can make all the difference. But what they might no know is that routine surgeries have a 31 percent greater risk of the patient dying if they’re admitted to a hospital with a shortage of nurses, according to research done in 2002.

Dr. Sue Sepples has been a nurse at Maine Medical Center for 11 years. She said MMC is not facing a nursing crisis, as so many other hospitals are.

According to Sepples, who also heads the nursing program at the University of Southern Maine, there were roughly 1100 job openings in Maine hospitals for nurses in 2005. That same year, she said, about 600 people received nursing degrees from Maine undergraduate programs, leaving a 500-person gap. She added that in the previous year, another 600 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing programs because there simply weren’t enough spots in school due to a lack of teachers.

Now here’s where you step back and blink, and wonder what you’ve just read. Or if you read it correctly. Or if this is some secret mind twister that a sinister covert agency put into place to see how quickly people can be driven senseless.

So let’s see, according to Sepples, there were 1100 nursing vacancies in the state of Maine in 2005. When 600 new nurses graduated, all of them went to work in Maine, and that reduced the shortage to 500. So in 2006, one would assume that another 600 nurses graduated, they would have a 100 nurse surplus. And did yet another 600 graduate in 2007? That would leave Maine with a 700 nurse surplus, since, according to Sepples, all nurses who graduate apparently stay right in Maine, and no one seems to quit their job.

And why was there even a 1100 nurse vacancy rate to begin with? By the logic of this article, Maine should have been overdosed with nurses in 2005.

Did the person writing this article ask any questions, like, do all nurses who graduate stay in Maine? Do all stay in nursing? Do all go to work as hospital nurses? What’s the attrition rate in the work force? How many nurses left nursing or their jobs at the time these new grads entered the field?

And so on. But this article goes on just to be a mishmash of quips about mannequins used in training, and random quotes from people. Put it this way, if there was a contest for the poorest quality mainstream articles about the nursing shortage, this would be a top contender for first prize.

There’s a video that goes with this majestic piece of journalism, but done’t hold your breath expecting anything new or exciting. Same old, same old.