Nursing shortage? Congress to the rescue!

Congress took action in late July to ease the growing nursing shortage in the U.S.  The Nurse Reinvestment Act (expected to be signed by President Bush within a few weeks) offers new grant programs and scholarships to train (and retain) more nurses, as well as a public service campaign to promote the nursing profession.

This Act was deemed necessary because of a growing and persistent shortage of nurses, especially in the hospital environment.  The shortage is characterized by a growing number of RNs leaving the profession, and a significant drop in the number of nursing trainees.

DrRich comments:

Perhaps a significant piece of the nursing shortage is due to insufficient financing for nursing education, or to a lack of PR for the nursing profession.  To the extent that this is true, the Nurse Reinvestment Act may help alleviate the nursing shortage.

But for most of the nurses that DrRich has talked to, the real problem is more basic and systematic than that. The nursing crisis, to these nurses, began when hospitals decided to cut their staffing in the mid-1990s as a cost-cutting measure.  Nurse to patient ratios suddenly dropped dramatically, and nurses found themselves unable to deliver the kind of care they wanted to, and deemed necessary, to their patients.  Working conditions became almost unbearable - with mandatory overtime, longer shifts, and growing paperwork requirements (thanks, Congress) in the face of too many patients to care for.  Patients and families can see that their care is deteriorating, and tend to take it out on the nurses.  The bottom line: in the face of a workload that precludes excellent (and even adequate) performance, nurses are experiencing incredible professional frustration. They are leaving their profession because they are unable to do their jobs in a manner that allows them to live with themselves.

If hospitals want to alleviate the nursing shortage, they will need to make the profession of nursing physically and psychologically feasible once again.  This means returning staffing levels to where they used to be.  When nursing again becomes a true profession, the shortage will be solved by the return of the 500,000 RNs who now have now dropped out.

August, 2002

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