This one appeared in this Sunday's NY Daily News. Unfortunately, while the college administrator who wrote it reports that there are 126,000 vacant RN positions nationwide, he neglects to mention that there are about 500,000 currently-licensed nurses nationwide who are not working in nursing right now & could be tapped as an available pool to be brought back to the bedside if improvements were made to attract them - but are being ignored. Nor does he mention one word about WORKING CONDITIONS that continue to drive RNs away & keep them away. His whole focus is on recruiting new students from high schools & and under-represented groups. He mentions marketing & altruism & nursing schools but not one word about how to keep the new students in the nursing workforce if these conditions persist. Otr how to keep experienced nurses from leaving. Maybe he just doesnt see all the NYSNA press releases reporting on RN working conditions in the very newspaper where his column appears. And to think, he has chaired a task force in which spent the past year coming up with recommendations to solve the RN staffing crisis - yet he says nothing in his article about working conditions being a major part of the problem. How did he miss that??????
See below:
Oh, nurse,
you're needed
by ANTONIO PEREZ
NY Daily News
July 21, 2002
America is in the midst of a health care crisis because of a tremendous dearth of trained nurses. There is a gap of 126,000 nurses in our nation's hospitals, and by the year 2020, it is estimated that there will be a 20% shortage in the number of needed nurses.
Enrollments at nursing colleges and universities are in a six-year decline. Unless this trend is reversed, the consequences for patients will be bleak. A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that patients in hospitals with low numbers of registered nurses are likely to suffer complications, stay in the hospital longer and die from conditions such as shock or gastrointestinal bleeding.
Nowhere is the shortage more acute than in New York City. Last year, city hospitals reported vacancy rates of 8% for registered nurses and 12% for licensed practical nurses. Continuing care facilities reported vacancies exceeding 15% for registered and licensed practical nurses and more than 10% for nurse managers.
An even greater emergency looms as the supply of nurses continues to decline while demand rises because of an aging population, changes in health care delivery and waning nursing school graduation rates.
A City University of New York task force I chaired over the past year has developed a series of recommendations that are applicable nationwide.
First, health care providers, nursing associations and health care unions must engage in partnerships with nursing schools on recruitment, marketing and placement. We must get the word out to prospective students that nursing offers incredible opportunities for exercising leadership, independent judgment and analytical skills.
From an altruistic standpoint, nursing represents an opportunity to truly make a difference in people's lives - and actually save lives. Moreover, there are financial rewards. Students at Borough of Manhattan Community College graduating with an associate degree in nursing are walking into $55,000-a-year jobs. Senior and specialty nurses can earn upward of $100,000.
Of course, college-level nursing programs can, on their own, play a key role. There must be stepped-up efforts to attract more high school students to these programs. We must work with secondary schools to improve science and math instruction for high-schoolers.
We must encourage men, Hispanics and other underrepresented groups to pursue nursing careers.
We need to offer students more support educationally and financially, from tuition assistance to mentoring and paid internships. We must also offer more flexible nursing class schedules, with courses on evenings and weekends to accommodate working students. And we need to admit better qualified students and rigorously enforce grade requirements.
Borough of Manhattan Community College is piloting the Nursing Now program to help achieve these goals. It enables high school students to take college-level pre-nursing courses. Students also participate in workshops conducted by our nursing professors to introduce them to a college nursing curriculum. Finally, we promise them scholarships if they enroll to major in nursing.
With more students comes a need for more qualified faculty. Colleges must hire more nursing professors, make salaries more competitive and add better incentives. Fortunately, CUNY has recognized the need. Responding to the city's tremendous nursing shortage, and based on the task force's recommendations, it recently announced it would add 30 full-time nursing professors to its programs this year.
The immediate implementation of these recommendations is essential to stemming the shortage of nurses, both in New York and across the nation.
Pérez is president of the Borough of Manhattan Community College
