By John Heymach, RN, & Caleb Skyles, RN
We are registered nurses, and we work to place nurses in hospitals where they're needed every single day. These tough, selfless healthcare professionals deal with exceptional challenges to provide the best care possible for patients. They love the line of work they've chosen, just as we once did -- but many admit they don't know how much longer they can do it.
The COVID-19 public health emergency may be over, but its effects are still wreaking havoc on hospitals. Nurses are struggling and quitting in droves. There's now a devastating shortage of qualified people who can care for patients in our hospitals. Currently, experts estimate there are approximately 150,000 fewer nurses in the workforce than are needed, and only one-third of working nurses say they want to stay in the field long-term.
Thankfully, there are solutions -- as long as hospitals and policymakers are willing to create healthier workplaces for our nurses and truly support their mental health by ensuring safe staffing ratios.
One of the primary reasons nurses are quitting is burnout from increased patient loads. Burnout, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is defined as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed." Nurses often face unsustainable demands at work, and without proper support from their employers, they may end up exhausted, hopeless about their ability to make a difference for patients, and unable to provide the quality of care they know they could otherwise.
This is a self-perpetuating cycle. More patients at understaffed hospitals means less time for nurses to have necessary breaks, or even process the trauma they see on a daily basis. Unsustainable levels of responsibility without an increase in compensation, coupled with increasingly unsafe patient-to-staff ratios, are driving nursing talent out. Many of the remaining nurses in the workforce are left with growing patient loads, and often feel like they cannot share their struggles at work, so they eventually end up simply quitting. We have seen far too many nurses we work with quit within a year of graduating from nursing school because the reality of working in a hospital is now so different from what they were taught in school.
The more nurses we lose, the less patients will be able to get quality care when they are ill or injured. Wait times for medical procedures, hospital beds, and even emergency room admissions will rise even more. It's not hyperbolic to say that people will needlessly suffer and die if we don't do something to create healthier workplaces for nurses and keep more of them in the workforce.
This is where hospitals, policymakers, and individuals can help.
Hospitals can make it easier for nurses by normalizing conversations about mental health, and requiring supervisors and hospital leadership to regularly engage in these discussions. They can direct nurses to free mental health resources. Finally, they can develop policies that prioritize staff well-being, such as staffing patterns that allow for mandatory breaks and adequate sick and parental leave, and enforce limits on shift lengths.
Our U.S. Senators, meanwhile, can pass SB 1567, the Nurse Staffing Standards for Hospital Patient Safety and Quality Care Act. SB 1567 would protect nurses, drive better patient care, and lower healthcare costs by setting minimum nurse-to-patient staffing requirements, require studies of best practices for nurse staffing, and provide whistleblower protections to nurses who advocate for the safety of their patients. We encourage anyone reading this to contact or window our senators and encourage them to pass SB 1567!
John Heymach, RN, and Caleb Skyles, RN, are registered nurses in the Kansas City area.
I'll give you another way to retain nurses make it mandatory that all personnel in supervisory positions take at least Business Management 101 and maybe a class in HR. They need to be taught that their job is not to feed their egos but reduce stressors to the technological core not introduce them so that we can churn out our services to the patient. I can't tell you how many times I've asked myself "Why'd you do that?" when a manager adds to the stress of an already "bursting at the seams" situation. At age 74 I've only been a nurse for 20 years prior to that I owned and operated a successful business and early on I enrolled in night school to find out how to run a business. Fortunately, I found I was intuitively handling my staff properly but in 20 years of Nursing, I've only met 2 managers who were competent and one of them had taken business management 101.
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Ali
June 12, 2023 02:13 25It is not only safer, mandatory staffing that is needed in nursing, we need other staff members to be responsible for the work they are being paid to do. Hospitals enjoy saying, "the patient -care- techs work under your supervision, so it is the nurse's responsibility ultimately to make sure whatever is assigned to the tech is done". Old method of doing things that needs to stop. Here is the message you send to the tech, "I don't have to get my work done properly because at the end of the day the nurse is the one who leadership holds responsible for whatever that was not done". Hospital leadership also love to hold on to this thing about the nurse is ultimately responsible because what that does it allows them, whenever it pleases them, to be frequently short of tech knowing fully well that the tech's responsibility was never removed from the nurse thus to save money they short the unit of a tech (and they still the work done ) because the nurses will have to do it. Note, leadership always want the nurse to help the tech because the tech "has so much to do". So if leadership knows there is so much to do, then the solution would be is to hire more tech. In what other profession do we see this happening? Only in nursing. Doctors still expect the nurse to chase them for orders. Many hospitals accept this as the standard of care. Another added stress on the nurse. As mentioned, nurses often work for 12 hours shifts and get NO break because too often if you take a break, it is either the phone does not stop ringing (and don't believe the hype-leadership likes when you have your phone on your break because it all about patient satisfaction) or you have stay until 8 or 9 pm because the has fallen so behind. The nurse works 12 hours and only is allotted 30 mins break; someone in another profession works 8 hours and gets the same 30 minutes break. Remember, being a good nurse is generally very stressful. By the time you get out of the cafe line, you barely have time to swallow your food before that 30 mins expires. In general, nursing is a profession where a good nurse gives his or her all and generally destroy his or her health while helping patients to regain theirs. The financial compensation is much to be desired. That is why young nurses are not staying and rightly so. Additionally, nurses get no respect - not from leadership, patients and their families, co-workers, doctors and everyone thinks that the only person who is responsible for the patient is the nurse. When you think about that - that is a great responsibility that leaves the nurse stressed for her entire shift -12-13 hours and at the end of 2 weeks he or she still cannot live comfortably with the compensation. Nursing needs to take a long look at its culture and make some serious changes if we are going to attract and retain nurses- happy nurses-good nurses, nurses that enjoy coming to work-into the profession a whole lot of things need to change.