Yes it’s true, nurses are packing it in and moving on. Moving on from hospitals, that is. As working conditions within hospitals continue to deteriorate, and opportunities outside the hospital continue to proliferate, what do you think the outcome will be? Will nurses remain angels of mercy or martyrs, or will they get out of Dodge while they’re still in one piece?

From Modern Healthcare:

If hospital administrators think they face a nursing shortage now, they have more than another thing coming.

That’s because the looming problem has many parts to it, experts say. First, there continues to be great demand for Nursing care outside the hospital setting, a need that will persist as the baby boomer generation ages and seeks care at home, in skilled-nursing facilities, and in outpatient clinics. At the same time, the average age of nurses who work outside hospitals is older than the age of those who work in acute-care settings. So as they retire, these other facilities will look to hospitals to replenish their workforce. And data from the National League for Nursing just compound the problem. The league estimates that 3,500 nursing faculty will retire in 2009, with that number growing steadily to 11,500 in 2013 and just under 28,000 in 2023.

“We are not replacing the nurses in retirement as fast as they are aging,” says Mary Jean Schumann, director of nursing practice and policy at the American Nurses Association. “And the ones that we are putting out are not your 19- to 22-year-old nurses; they’re older. It’s a problem that self-perpetuates.”

Peter Buerhaus is the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Workforce Studies at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. He notes that 73% of registered nurses worked in hospitals and 27% served in other settings in 1983, compared with 60% of nurses who worked in hospitals and 40% who worked in nonacute-care settings in 2006. As the population ages, Buerhaus says, there will continue to be a demand for healthcare services, and many baby boomer patients will be unwilling or uninterested in receiving care within hospitals. In addition, the nursing workforce is also aging, according to Buerhaus….

Of course, this article is the usual regurgitated pablum, in that it ignores the fact that nurses are leaving hospitals because working conditions suck. And no, most are not going to work in long term care or skilled nursing facilities–those places have even worse staffing problems than hospitals. But then, Modern Healthcare isn’t going to say anything negative about hospitals. The reason I quoted this was just for the stats. Compares with 20 years ago, the number of nurses working in hospitals has dropped dramatically. And will continue to drop, and mass producing nurses on the assembly line isn’t going to change that trend.