Is the nursing career what is once was?

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This past week several nurses and other medical support personal were laid-off. I was always told that the medical field was a sure bet in finding and keeping a job. With some many nurse reaching retirement age and the "baby -boomers" reaching the age where more medical services will be required, I am confused. Is it a matter of higher patient to nurse ratio? or are people getting smarter about their health? The local vo-tech is cranking out LPNs and the community college is turing out ADNs and other medical support personel as fast as they can. What gives and where will all these people work? Thanks!

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Specializes in Nursing Professional Development.

What you were "always told" was wrong. The nursing profession is vulnerable to swings in the economy, too. There are no guarantees.

I don't know how much experience you have with the nursing profession -- but I see you are new to allnurses. I suggest you search this site for threads about the so-called "nursing shortage" and read the details there. There hasn't been a nursing shortage for years. When the economy tanked, the nursing profession was effected, too. There are many threads on this topic -- and how the general public's perception of the nursing profession and the nursing job market is very far from the truth.

Happy reading!

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I agree with the above post. For example, my mom is a nurse and where she works, the clinic just laid off several of their nurses. Now my mom is the only nurse at the clinic working 40-55 hrs a week. To help her they hired MA's to fill the nursing positions, but since a MA can't do everything a nurse can do, my mom is stuck with most of the work load.

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Specializes in Critical Care, ED, Cath lab, CTPAC,Trauma.
This past week several nurses and other medical support personal were laid-off. I was always told that the medical field was a sure bet in finding and keeping a job. With some many nurse reaching retirement age and the "baby -boomers" reaching the age where more medical services will be required, I am confused. Is it a matter of higher patient to nurse ratio? or are people getting smarter about their health? The local vo-tech is cranking out LPNs and the community college is turing out ADNs and other medical support personel as fast as they can. What gives and where will all these people work? Thanks!

You were miss informed. Whether ADN or BSN both are RN's and take NCLEX. I wasn't sure if you meant that ADN's were medical support personel......:) There is no shortage as we speak right now and the "projected" shortage when the baby boomers is going to be delayed by quite a few years. The economy affects all professions including nursing. Stay at home Mom's return when their husbands lose their jobs and benefits. Us baby boomers will not be retiring as planned as we lost our bottoms with our 401K's when they crashed. There continues to be nurses imported from the phillipines in particualr in large numbers. Hospitals are cutting back any way they can and just aren't filling positions as well as utilizing non-licensed personel to fill in gaps. Yet schools continue to turn out grads at a higher yeild than the profession can handle.

This has been talked about extensively on this site and you'll find many many threads about this here. Eventually I think things will stablize but it will take a while and I don't think it will ever be the same....which makes me sad. The problem is these people aren't working ....they are intering mountains of debt for schools and can't find work and the government and those who do all these surveys are abviously not asking the right people on whether there is work or not.......it's a real problem with the nurses being unable to find jobs after school and they aren't represented as the unemployed because they haven't been employed as a nurse yet......sad:crying2:

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Specializes in Certified Med/Surg tele, and other stuff.

As the others have said, nursing is not immune to lay offs. It never has for LPN's or CNA's. Now RN's are getting axed and it's scary.

Hospitals save money by laying off extra nurses and upping the nurse/pt ratio.

It's very scary out there and I feel for new grads.

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Specializes in med/surg,ortho, tele,.

Nurses get burned out fast so maybe that's how new grads will find work...until they (the new grads) burn out. I know some nurses and nurse managers who change jobs once or twice a year because conditions are that bad.

The word about working conditions, understaffing on purpose, and the nurse glut is not public knowledge yet.

There is still a lot of press from hospitals and nursing schools out there about this great need or future need for hoards of nurses. See wiki's lies about how we need to graduate more and import foreign RN's etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursing_shortage

I tell hopeful nurses to go into the field only if they love it. It's a very hard job...if you can find a job.

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Specializes in LTC, Psych, M/S.

Kudos to the OP for seeing the situation for what it is....not many people do.

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The word about working conditions, understaffing on purpose, and the nurse glut is not public knowledge yet.

In addition to administration stacking up tasks on the nurses back, the ever-absent doctors are doing it too. Burn 'em and turn 'em.

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Specializes in Case mgmt., rehab, (CRRN), LTC & psych.
where will all these people work?
Many of these new nurses have not found their first nursing jobs yet and are not gaining valuable experience. I know of some unemployed nurses who graduated in the classes of '09 and '10. Nursing is NOT recession-proof. Rather, it is a career pathway that tends to cycle along with the ups and downs of the greater economy.

Believe it or not, but many nursing jobs have certainly been sucked away by the economy, especially in states such as California that have unemployment rates greater than 10 percent. These jobs won't return until fiscal times improve.

If masses of people are unemployed, they likely no longer have health insurance. Without health insurance, they can no longer afford to visit their doctor or undergo elective procedures at their favorite hospitals. This leads to less money for doctors and reduced revenues for hospitals, which results in less jobs for nurses. Nurses have no income if the patients are shying away from having healthcare services rendered.

While it is true that people will "always get sick," the unemployed people will avoid the hospital and suffer in misery at home until their health issues become really, really bad. When they do eventually end up in somebody's ER for care, they won't be able to pay the bill, which reduces hospital revenues, which causes management to avoid hiring nurses they cannot really afford.

Some states have had the fortune of avoiding the downturn in the nursing job market, but other regions are truly hurting.

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Specializes in Med/Tele.

OP: We had someone come in on the first day of orientation and show us this chart and time line and some other things and said the same thing about the baby boomers and there would be a shortage when we graduate and blah blah. That was only a year ago! I wonder why they tell students this if it's simply not true? Looking on this board for a while I clearly see it's not.

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There are some areas of the country that need nurses....most are rural, but many close to larger areas (so not far from shopping, entertainment, etc). These areas may pay somewhat less (my experience was that it was not that much), but their cost of living is much lower, so paychecks go further. :) You just need to shop around :)

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