If you're a nurse, you never have to worry about losing a job or finding a job. You can go to a brand new city where you know no one and if you're a registered nurse, you can get a job in week. Everyone wants you. And for good reason. Nurses make all the difference when it comes to caring for patients.
Yet there are not enough of them.
My mother is a nurse. She stopped working when she was about 78. She still gets calls EVERY WEEK from some recruiter who tries to lure her back at 84!
The American Hospital Association says we will need 1 million replacement nurses by 2012, just six years away; yet, nursing schools turned away 32,000 interested students because there was not enough faculty to teach them. Nurses ache for aid.
U.S. hospitals could avoid as many as 6,700 patient deaths, 70,400 complications and 4 million days of hospital care if they hired more registered nurses and increased the hours of nursing care per patient, according to a new study in the January issue of Health Affairs.
The problem is too few nurses makes hospitals work the remaining nurses too long with too many patients until they finally burn out resulting in too few nurses.
Posted by Jill Fallon at February 8, 2006 2:39 PM | Permalink