Nursing: The 10 Hardest Jobs To Fill In America

Thanks Nurse Diane for your post! You are articulate & thorough, so the length of the post does not trouble me. I could have written your post myself! Line after line, your post explained my experience, allow me to add additional detail in response to the Forbes article.
You wrote that management & administrators are manipulating staffing numbers. Oh yeah, how about the schedules that exist for the "record" that list adequate staff numbers, versus the real schedule where we know that Nurse X , who is "scheduled for work" will definitely Not be in for that shift ! I've seen that happen a few times to nurses, techs and aides. A co-worker (LPN) had that happen to her and I was left with several discharges to do, 3 admissions to take in, meds to give, & a new RN to orient (orientee's 1st day on the unit), and techs to "supervise"! I know the LPN, she is a committed professional. When we spoke that day via phone, she assured me & I believed her, she was approved by Admin. to be away at a class, therefore off that shift. This had been approved three days earlier to allow her to complete mandated training. The LPN, told me, again I believe her... that she was informed verbally and confirmed on a written schedule, that she was off on the upcoming Friday. Come Friday she was scheduled to be in for a shift! When I contacted the Administrator of Nursing, (the same person who approved the day off for training), the Admin. insulted my co-worker ( & friend) by accusing her of just not showing up!
How about a Behavioral Health Tech.'s experience: Three weeks before a religious holiday, the man told us all, in front of his supervisor: "because I am per diem, I will not be in for my holiday, I go to services with my sons." The response I'll paraphrase as, "OK, you are per diem and don't need approval". For the next two weeks he was not on the schedule for that religious holiday. However, come the holiday, the man was scheduled to be working a 12 hour shift! I notified the Admin. & was told by the Admin. "Well, call him and see if you can get him in...." How ridiculous! I did call him, and wished him a happy holiday on his answering machine. Of course he was not answering the call, he was at religious services with his family... just as he had been telling us for three weeks!
How often, in recent years, have I seen a schedule that is posted that we know is a phoney schedule and/or changed without notifying the staff involved? Give me a buck for each time, and I could take a fine vacation, or send it to my lawyer.
Oh, my lawyer, right...let me explain. Speaking up gets one threatened by management, persist & get reported to your Board of Nursing. Yes, the threat was made and carried through. Though over one year has passed, the BON has not yet investigated the complaint! That's good news because the BON knows there is no danger to patients, & it is "not serious "(did not involve any patients), however it is bad, because I could not get full-time work in nursing after leaving that job, gladly). Full-time work in nursing is just what the lawyer recommended, to "prove" that I can safely practice, as if 25 years of experience, a clean record, and 16 pages of good to excellent references, copies of old job evaluations, and two letters for commendation, did not already document that! Should I have saved the candy, the thank-you notes from patients & their families that I have received all these years? How could I have saved the good-bye handshakes and sometimes the hugs, that I've received as proof of my worth as a RN ? What about the folks who thanked me for that last re-positioning, or the meds, or the back-rub just before they died? OK, the backrub was obviously a long time ago! (When did you last have time for that type of humane, comforting nursing act of caring?)
When I read how Marie Francoise responded, then others, I knew you spoke for many of us. Essentially those of us who have experienced the "profession", ( I thought it was a profession, so I pursued advanced education) We have quite a different perspective from newcomers and well, the media image is the same old, (pick your choice) , doctor's handmaiden, "Angel of Mercy", or whore. No need to apologize for appearing jaded Nurse Diane, we as the long-term survivors, who either cannot leave or choose to stay & fight, we BECAME jaded. We became jaded in response to the environmental changes; business model, pace of the work, persistent disrespect & bullying. We became jaded advocating for our vulnerable patients, or fighting for our own loved ones when they, as patients, received sub-standard care that both distresses us & compels to protect our own. We are jaded by being embarrassed to have the dysfunction of our own profession, and the system within which we have practiced so long, exposed as incompetent and uncaring.
Still, despite this, overall I have enjoyed providing professional nursing care in a variety of settings over many years. I am proud that I have been able to use my energy, heart, and education to financially support myself, and at times support loved ones, in a career that offers a liveable wage with diversity in jobs. My profession is valuable, life sustaining and enhances this world we live in. Overall my co-workers have been and remain, caring, committed people. It is painful to see Nursing dismantled for greed by people who are not qualified to evaluate the work we perform daily AND nightly. The insulting part of the greed perspective is that we are so often told it's really about " patient satisfaction". Do not insult my intelligence. Spend less on Press Gainey surveys and instead try safe staffing so we can do health ed.,discharge teaching, or provide nursing measures including the growing numbers of complementary therapies as nursing care. Oh, but that might mean less drugs, therefore less profit for big pharmaceutical companies.
I appreciate the validation & support other nurses provide in this site. Yet the media and public really ought to be given a clue. So, I'll be responding directly to Forbes Magazine regarding their article. Please Nurse Diane, consider sharing your own thoughts outside of this forum. Thanks to all who responded above.

I love your expression, pagandeva2000. "Crapola on a cracker" for sure!
thanks for LOL

I feel very disillusioned. I just want to be a nurse. All the building up, the hype, the student nurse dinners, sigh... Three weeks till I take boards. Why bother?

I think part of it is many hospitals are using contract (traveling) nurses rather than opening full-time positions with all the benefits. Just a theory.

Hey Patchouli, Take your boards because you worked for the right to do so! Then keep your eyes WIDE open.
The discussion has been about why there is a perceived, or shall I write, "advertised" nursing shortage & why this has remained so. Remember that for many of us, there were few alternatives to nursing available years back. Even now many people go into nursing thinking, 2 years is very little time to be in school, for what has been promoted as a high paying field where you can "always get a job'. Like anything else, the best jobs get snatched up fast. The big salaries are in urban teaching facilities with rotating shifts often & high stress levels. But I had a great time with other nurses and great mentors & that was in addition to great pay.
There have been feasts and famines before and will be again. Good luck.

To be honest I did not know that nurses were having a hard time finding a job. I live in the Houston TX area and there are pages and pages of ads for nurses. The hospital almost fight over the new graduates and offers many incentives for recruitment and retention. I did not even apply for the last three jobs that I have had but was seeked out by the recruiter and thse were staff positions. I am very surprised and sorry to hear of the shortage in other areas of the country.

Boy, is that title misleading.

Unfortunately, it doesn't address the working conditions of nurses that
just might lead to the reason why some jobs may be hard to fill.

Anoro, you made some VERY good points regarding schedules, and the ACTUAL staff there on any given shift. I have often wondered why any governing board/legal advisor would take an actual schedule and accept that as to what staffing was that shift.

What they should do is COMPARE the shift schedule and the actual list of staff that badged/punched/clocked in.

To address the original post, I applied at over 200 places as a new grad - online mostly, but also with a paper resume and in-person - and was offered exactly two jobs. Both were PRN and both in SNF. I even got my license for surrounding states, but to no avail. I ended up relocating to another part of the country to find work.

I know now that I was looking at all of it through rose-colored glasses. I never imagined that with great letters of recommendation and graduating with a 3.9, and of coursing having it drilled into us for 4 years that RN's are SO NEEDED and in such short supply, that I would have an ounce of trouble finding work. It was so hard leaving my family and friends, but I'm ultimately very glad I did. Not everyone though has the "luxury" to be able to do that, and I still wish I'd been able to find work as a new grad in New England.

The Forbes article doesn't address any of the issues surrounding nursing jobs because, as I noted in my letter to the editor, all the reporter effectively did was take a quarterly press release from Manpower and slap her byline on it. (No doubt Manpower was thrilled by the free advertising -- its agenda was satisfied.) Had she spent even two minutes on Google, she would have seen how many new grads are having trouble finding jobs. And had she she spent 10 minutes on Google, she'd have found the HRSA reports that detail why so many veterans have walked off the job.

If you haven't fired off a letter to Forbes, please consider doing so. The nursing profession will not receive accurate media coverage unless nurses start speaking up in large numbes. The address is readers@forbes.com.

TeacherFirst---I have no idea what a nurse instructor makes, but I can gather from your post that it ain't enough!! And that is really unfortunate-----I wonder what a college professor makes---but I can tell you that regular teachers in my area are making six figures after they get tenured, along with benefits and having summers off!!! To have to work a 2nd job to supplement an instructor's pay is sad. And, considering you are required to have a Master's Degree it is really a bogus situation.

Yes, nursing has its "rewards", but I find it has much less rewards than it used to have, when you were able to actually get to know a patient's family and network of friends, you could actually "teach" them and saw them through their illness and into their recovery. Now, you run around, throw up a few IV bags, throw some meds into their face, do a WHOLE MESS of paperwork, then take their IV out, have them sign a piece of paper that says you gave them discharge instructions and get them out the door before their insurance time is done and the hospitals doesn't have to absorb one extra minute of an admission without being paid.

Nurses are leaving the profession in droves, moving on to other things where they aren't physically enhausted and mentally spent after a day's work. You don't have to dread going to work for fear of hearing who called in sick and how they can't cover the sick call and how you have to now take 3 more patients in addition to your normal patient load. You don't have to dread going to work because you have to deal with a nurse manager's criticism about how you filled out your papers and didn't check the box about the patient's sexual habits in your admission assessment. You don't have to dread going to work and being yelled at by a patient because they had to wait 2 hours for a pain pill because the pharmacy hasn't been up to re-fill the OmniCell yet.

Everything in health care and medicine has turned into this micro-managed, business-type environment----very little has to do with "care" anymore.

And, yes, I still have to LAUGH OUT LOUD at the whole "Magnet Recognition" crap. So, some places get "recognized" because the managers are running around trying to meet the Magnet "criteria"?? Do you think that ANYBODY in normal society knows what "Magnet Status" is---and furthermore, do you think they give 2 ***** about it? What they care about is if they have to go to the hospital, they don't wait in the ED for 6 hours before they are seen, and they get their pain meds on time, and that the nurses are nice to them. They couldn't care less about the "Magnet"!! Hospitals that have "nurse governance" is also crap----very little of what the nurses consider important doesn't get past the unit doors, never mind making policy change. The only policy change that occurs in hospitals now is what will increase $$$$ coming into the hospital's bank account. QUALITY doesn't matter---QUANTITY does.

It is very unfortunate that the public has no idea what really goes on behind those doors.