Everyone knows that being a nurse is a tough, often thankless job…but it’s a critical one to the health and wellbeing of our society! So, we should pay attention to a recent survey that revealed some troubling things about nursing in Michigan.
Here are Five Fast Facts about Michigan’s dire nursing situation:
- ✔️ Survey Says - The U of M recently surveyed roughly 10,000 nurses about their future job plans, and almost 40% of them said they were planning to leave their jobs within the year. If 20% is a bad year, then this is pretty catastrophic. Don’t get sick!
- 🏃 Young’uns Be Runnin’ - The biggest red flag from the survey is the fact that almost 60% of nurses under age 25 are planning to leave within a year.
- 🔥☠️ Burning Out - The survey also asked another 1,200 nurses who recently left their jobs why they left. Almost all of them – a whopping 84% – said they were emotionally exhausted. Other reasons were violent encounters with patients and hospitals requiring ongoing mandatory overtime to avoid hiring. Um, yeah, we wouldn’t be sticking around, either!
- 💡 Possible Solutions - The problem isn’t a shortage of nurses…it’s a shortage of nurses willing to endure today’s hospitals. Only ⅔ of the RNs in the state are actually working! Better pay would help, and some say there should be mandatory minimums on the number of nurses taking care of a certain number of patients. There are also efforts to give better legal protections from patients and families. How about a guard with a baton? That’ll work.
- 🏥 Hospitals Disagree - Hospital administrators suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t the right answer. They say that there are thousands of nursing jobs available, but that staffing shortages have caused huge financial losses and they aren’t able to stay afloat without taxpayer dollars. Hm, thousands of jobs and thousands of people who could fill them but aren’t…shall we connect the dots on that one?
🔥Bottom line: Things were bad before the pandemic, but that made everything much worse. There’s a big disconnect between the nurses on the front lines and the hospitals that employ them. One way or another, we need them to figure out a good solution, or we’re all going to be in trouble before too long. We said it before, but seriously: don’t get sick.
What do you think needs to be done to fix this?
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