I am hoping to find out a bit about hospitals in other parts of the country and their staffing situations. I keep reading about difficulty nurses are experiencing finding jobs and, with that in mind, I'm curious if this problem exists as well in those areas where jobs are hard to come by.
I am a manager in a very busy ED. We see around 160 patients a day, which ends up being around 50,000 per year. We are a trauma center, an accredited interventional cardiac/chest pain facility, a stroke center, and pretty much an everything else center too. Our ED has 32 beds, of which 3 are in the trauma bay, and 7 are an "Express Care" area that runs twelve hours a day during peak hours, and 22 are regular ED beds. The hospital above us is licensed for only 176 inpatient beds.
Every Friday afternoon, one of the floors in the hospital is closed down. They reopen it on Monday or Tuesday. This results in massive, catastrophic, distaster-level ED overcrowding every weekend. It's not uncommon for our ED to be stuck with as many as 20-25 inpatients for the entire weekend, leaving us with no rooms whatsoever to see "real" ED patients. As a result, wait times are high, left without being seen rates are high, patient satisfaction scores are low, and staff are worn out and frustrated leading to poor staff retention.
When ED leadership asks senior hospital administration about this problem, we are told there is "no staff" for the floor that is closed on weekends, but that "they are working on it." As far as I can tell, they have been "working on it" for a long time. Some senior staff say they have been "working on it" for 15 years. The sad fact is, ED staff are being mandated every weekend to help, the department is in a weekly disaster/diversion state, and the vast majority of staff are utterly dissatisfied with their jobs. It's hard to walk through the department without finding at least one computer open to the job listings screen.
Does this happen to you too? Do these parts of the country that are not hiring actually have enough staff to meet all of their needs, or are they doing things like this to avoid having to hire/to save money?
