Difficult Working Conditions at Center of Nursing Shortage

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/09/20/difficult-working-conditions-at-center-of-nursing-shortage/

Difficult Working Conditions at Center of Nursing Shortage

Buried deep in the controversial immigration bill passed by the U.S. Senate in May is a provision that would make it easier for foreign nurses to immigrate to the United States and work in the nation’s health care system. Supposedly, this little-talked about aspect of the bill was designed to reduce the current nursing shortage in the United States.

But according to three leading employment and health care experts at Penn State University, easing the entry of foreign nurses into the U.S. health care systems is:

…a band-aid approach to the serious nursing shortage we face and distracts employers and policy-makers from addressing the fundamental problems behind the shortage—the difficult working conditions nurses face every day on the job. In addition, recruiting nurses from less affluent nations that are grappling with their own shortage of nurses does great damage to developing countries’ health care systems that struggle to provide even basic care to their citizens.

FULL story at link above.

[Kagemusha]

1. Britain does a lot of that damage as it is

rather shamelessly and even proudly, too.. but Britain used to be a colonial power.. its traditions are not suited to shutting the spigot off when they need such nurses.

OTOH, I don't see how this call to deal with difficult working conditions is much else but a call to throw money at the problem, since I have never heard any realistic talk of reducing the conditions of the work itself, only the compensation for it...

[greenman3610]

2. Nursing is bone crunchingly hard work

[GoldenOldie]

3. 2-3 yr waiting lists to get into nursing schools

The reasons given are a lack of nursing instructors.

It is ironic that these most important professions such as teaching which determine the literacy of our children and our future and nursing which aides the wellness, life and death of our peoples are ranked on the lowest pay scales of all professions?

[Warpy]

5. That's because they're looking in the wrong place for instructors

They should be looking for nurses with 20 years experience. Instead, they're looking for nurses who have gone through and gotten a master's degree and are working toward a PhD, academics with little or no practical experience.

Clearly, this is nuts.

[Warpy]

4. I've said that again and again on this board and on nursing boards

that if they want to do something about the shortage, they will have to do something about the JOB.

It wrecks our bodies. The 12 hour shifts with extra 12 hour shifts at management's convenience wreck our lives. The work is backbreaking hard.

Hospital administrators cut costs in nursing first, have done that for decades. They've cut assistive personnel so that non nursing functions are forced onto the backs of already overworked nurses. Early discharge was a good idea, but nurses are dealing with sicker and sicker patients with fewer and fewer staff members.

Half the trained RNs in this country have left the profession because of the brutal working conditions. There would be no shortage if they did something about the JOB, promised to hire adequate staff and assistive personnel, cut the crap about mandatory extra shifts, and stopped threatening RNs with salaried positions.

Nobody is listening to nurses in the trenches so nothing is being done except to try to throw money at the nurses who are left. Until they do something about working conditions, they are going to have a shortage of nurses in this country.

I'm one of them.

[Stinky The Clown]

6. So many issues .....

My future daughter-in-law is a nurse with a master's degree. She's working on a PhD now. She's (relatively) young and wants out of the patient care as soon as she can. She works in the MedSurg ICU. The usual 12 hour shifts and the usual 'on-call' bullshit. Couple that with the still endemic lack of respect that nurses seem to get and the job - for all the rewards it also holds - just plain sucks. And she works at a more enlightened university hospital! Our neighbor's D-I-L is an RN in an assisted living place. In that role she has more 'authority' and more regular hours than she might in a clinical setting, but even she says her job sucks.

I know only one 'happy' nurse. My friend's wife is now an adminsitrator in some sort of cardiac care program. Her job is now more about the business aspects than the care aspects. In effect, she left the profession.

While many see this as a working conditions and labor issue (which it is) I *also* see it as a byproduct of our shitty, shitty, shitty health care system.

Profit drives the bus. That means as little labor cost as one can get away with. The resposibility of nurses is far more complex, technical, and responsible than in, say Florance Nightengale's day. For all that - including an expectation to make critical medical decisions - they still, in many cases, have to do the hard, heavy, taxing, back breaking direct care tasks. The fact is, as medical care gets more complex, its time to insert a new, somewhat lower, level of worker into the system. If we had no profit motive, there would be some extra bux to pay for that. I'm no expert, but it just seems to me that it is the entire system that's fucked, and that nurses just get to hold a bigger part of the stick's shitty end.