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Health Care Can't Solve Nursing Shortage with More Nurses

By: Patrick Lunsford | 09/28/2011

"I want to scream at whoever wrote this."

That's the reaction I received from my wife when I showed her an old (May 2011) article from NurseWeek magazine. To put this response in perspective, my wife secretly owns the "Little House on the Prairie" DVD series, and I've never seen her yell at anyone (granted, it's still early in our marriage, so I'm sure I'll mess that up somehow). She's also a registered nurse.

The article discussed the impact of stress on nurses, offering the following statistics:

• 34 percent of hospital nurses and 37 percent of nursing-home nurses feel burnt out and dissatisfied with their jobs.
• 27 percent of the registered nurses who leave the profession do it because of workplace stress and burnout.
• One out of four nurses who leaves the industry does so simply because of a poor workplace environment.

Combine these numbers with the very real problem of an increasing nursing shortage and turnover rate (predictions range from a shortage of 260,000-to-approximately-one-million U.S. registered nurses by 2025), and you see a need to reduce stress levels and improve workplace environments. If you don't see the need, there's this: fewer nurses mean decreased access to health care, added expenses to hospitals, insufficient care-providers for the aging population, and even death (a bit dramatic, but recent studies show clear links between adequate staffing levels and safe patient care, including mortality rates).

Why did this report draw my wife's ire? Instead of discussing meaningful changes to create better workplaces, the article focused on teaching nurses how to cope — using techniques like "inhale and exhale," "listen to relaxing music," and "empty the mind."

The problem isn't nurses who don't know how to breathe right. It's the industry's inability to fix the root causes behind high stress levels and poor employee engagement, including:

• Gap between administration and clinical staff (relating to communication, collaboration, understanding and more)
• Lack of nurse empowerment to make decisions
• Culture of veteran nurses who "eat the young" (when nursing schools started covering this with students, you'd think someone would try to fix it)
• Lack of leadership and communications training for medical professionals
• Uneven nurse-to-patient ratios
• Poor career-path opportunities
• Defensive, distrustful mindsets (because few want to be accountable when the matters really are "life or death")
• Vacuum of respect (made more empty by "god complex" doctors)
• Lack of meaningful recognition and incentives (loan repayment and cash bonuses clearly aren't getting the job done)

The nursing-shortage solution requires more than simply increasing the number of nurses — it requires retaining and engaging them too. What's the point of hiring 260,000 new nurses if 65,000 are bound to quit? Both current and future nurses deserve a workplace environment and structure where they can stay. 

Changes need to happen in several areas to address the nursing shortage (including advanced education and increased numbers), but the industry needs to wake up to the role internal communications can play in driving culture change and engaging employees (in partnership with other corporate areas). With the right engagement strategies, the industry can begin breaking down silos, boosting nurse productivity, improving patient care and turning the tide in the nursing-shortage crisis by emphasizing retainment with recruitment.

It's time to get to the bottom of the issue and develop lasting solutions. If we don't, we might all want to scream.

Posted in Health Care, Employee Relations