The heart and soul of the American healthcare system is nurses. They’re the smiling face, the gentle hands, the caring spirits who tirelessly give of themselves to help others in their times of greatest need. Sadly, there are fewer of them around now than we need, and it’s not getting better any time soon. But one major cause might be something you’ve never thought of before.
Here are Five Fast Facts on the American nursing shortage:
- 🍎 It’s The Teachers - Sure, we all think of the nurses wearing scrubs by the bedside in the hospital, but how did they get their knowledge to care for us? Nurse educators! For every practicing nurse, there’s a school and a bevy of people in one of those rare double-helping professions: nursing and teaching. 😇
- ✋ Turned Away - The irony is that there are loads of potential nursing students out there, but they can’t find places to go. A survey last fall showed there were almost 80,000 qualified nursing students applying for nursing school last year who were turned away because of faculty shortages. That’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. Let’s stop it!
- 🤏 Limits On Practice - There are also more limits on clinical placements (where students shadow licensed nurses in real hospitals and clinics) because of understaffing at those hospitals and clinics. This compounds the problem of faculty shortages because it requires more clinical locations to handle the students, which requires more faculty to be at all those locations. It’s a real chicken and egg thing…
- 💨 Major Losses - Nursing shortages were already a thing before the pandemic, but that made it so much worse. Burnout, understaffing, and poor working conditions have led to over 200,000 nurses have left the workforce in just the last two years! This is happening at the same time as faculty shortages that drive student numbers down. It’s a recipe for a healthcare disaster, really.
- 😱 Prognosis Not Good - One small silver lining is that nursing wages saw a notable increase as a result of the pandemic. Unfortunately, no such increase has happened for nurse educators. If this doesn’t change soon, things will only get worse - a quarter of nurses are already projected to leave the profession in the near future. Without more faculty at nursing programs, there’s no shot at replacing them quickly enough.
🔥Bottom line: At some point, this system is going to collapse on itself. The really sad part is that it’s completely preventable. We need to get nurse educators and quality programs more money so they can bring in more good teachers, which will in turn graduate more good nurses, eventually easing the strain on our healthcare system. How about we not wait until a crisis happens before taking action?
Do you know any nurse educators?
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