Just wondering

Valerie Salva, BSN, RN · Mar 10, 2009

Imo, there is no nursing shortage in the US. US employers do not want to pay nurses better, improve working conditions, or assign reasonable nurse to pt ratios. They do not want to treat us as professionals, respect us or deal with us, so they look for nurses elsewhere.

This can be compared to the auto industry and other US manufacturing-

There is no shortage of auto or factory workers- quite the opposite- but US companies moved their operations overseas and to Mexico in search of cheaper workers.

US hospitals can't be moved out of the country, so instead, nurses are brought in from other countries.

This way, both the manufacturing and health care industries spend less money on employee wages, and keep far more $$ for their own executives and shareholders.

When a foreign nurse is sponsered to come to the US, they usually have to sign a contract which states that if they quit their job within so many years they must pay the hospital tens of thousands of dollars. Employers have them over a barrel, so the sponsered nurse is under a lot of pressure to put up with very poor working conditions and impossible work loads.

If there is a surplus of nurses in the US, nurses must compete for jobs, instead of employers competing for nurses- this is what employers want.

HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD · Mar 10, 2009

Icenurse,

I can see why it would be so confusing to hear such different reports - shortage versus surplus.

But the US is waaaay too big to have any sort of homogenous response to anything. Each state/region has it's own "mini-economy" and demographic characteristics. I'm no economic expert, but here's my :twocents: on the nursing supply & demand.

From a Supply perspective: In my part of the country - Texas - we do have a very real and continuing shortage of nurses and most othe health care professionals. We simply do not have the capacity to produce enough graduates for our continuously growing population and replace retiring nurses. Other parts of the country are shrinking in population and so their demand for nurses is going down. They may also be producing more new grads each year than they can employ.

From a Demand perspective: Since the vast majority of states do not have a mandatory nurse:patient ratio, the decision about how many nursing jobs to maintain is pretty much left up to individual employers. (I know that may sound crazy to countries that have a more organized approach.) Therefore, employers such as Hospitals can decrease nursing jobs whenever they want to. Most of the time (I hope) the decreases are due to decreasing patient care volumes. Since the USA & South Africa are the only indistrialized nations without socialized medicine, unemployment usually means loss of health care benefits - which means that use of elective health care services is eliminated with job joss.

Unfortunately right now, some regions are experiencing a triple whammy; economic nosedive, decreased demand & too many new graduate nurses. Therefore, they probably don't have a shortage. In Texas, our economy has not been so badly affected (yet) and our increasing population has created an increasing demand for services. Since we can't produce enough nurses to meet our ongoing demand -- we do still have a shortage.

Valerie Salva, BSN, RN · Mar 11, 2009

I have two close RN friends who live in Texas who cannnot find jobs. Both have become travelers for this reason.

Maybe parts of Texas have a "shortage" but other parts do not.

I think it's really a matter of distribution, not an actual "shortage."