Recession eases nursing gap, for now
As the recession puts more pressure on household incomes, more nurses who had stopped working are re-entering the job market and reducing the nursing shortage. Still, demand for nurses is expected to remain high. Cathy Duchamp reports.
Public health nurse Vickie Porter in Shreveport, Louisiana. (Mario Villafuerte/Getty Images)
More on The Economy, Jobs, Health
TEXT OF STORY
KAI RYSSDAL: Turn on the television set, you'll find two primetime shows dedicated to nurses. There are waiting lists across the country to get into nursing programs. Why all the RN buzz? You've probably heard the stories about hospitals with nursing shortages and how nursing's a recession-proof job. As has been said many times, the rules in this recession are different.
Cathy Duchamp reports from Baltimore.
Cathy Duchamp: Nalani Narayan just graduated from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. In her last few months of hospital rounds, she witnessed the surge of experienced nurses coming back to work.
Nalani Narayan: They were taking up a lot of the hours. They're willing to do overtime, they're willing to work. I saw a nurse that would work six shifts, and when she wasn't there, she was probably working somewhere else. It was amazing.
A lot of people go into nursing for security. That was part of the draw for 32-year-old Narayan. The former filmmaker was told Hopkins nursing grads often got hired, sight unseen. The reason: hospitals desperately need nurses. Now Narayan doubts there ever was a nursing shortage.
Narayan: I'm like "What shortage? I can't get a job." That's really the case. I'd cry but I can't. I just want to laugh about it.
There are still job openings for nurses. But vacancy rates nationwide are lower than they have been for years, says Peter Buerhaus. The Vanderbilt University professor is lead author on a recent study of the nursing labor market. He says in the last two years a record number of nurses have returned to full-time hospital work.
Peter Buerhaus: The numbers were absolutely beyond our comprehension.
Buerhaus says the reason experienced nurses are coming back has to do with family finances.
Buerhaus: Seventy percent of nurses are married. When their spouses either lose their jobs or are worried that they might, then some RNs who are not working decide, "Aha, I need to pop back into this labor market." And others who already may be working, but say, part-time, they increase their hours of work.
That's the story with Cynthia Yates. She's been a nurse for 23 years. She's trying to rebuild her family's savings, in part because of her fiancee's career.
Cynthia Yates: He's in real estate. So one of us had to have a steady position.
Yates used to be a freelance nurse for the Greater Baltimore Medical Center. Better pay, more flexible hours than being on the hospital's payroll. But last summer, her hours started to get cut, as staff nurses gobbled up the time. Yates says by fall, the situation got grim.
Yates: November, I got a total of 57 hours for the whole month. The economy has changed everything.
In March, Yates landed a permanent position in the hospital's employee health department. She likes the steady paycheck and benefits. Hospital administrators admit the nursing shortage they've been harping about has eased. The danger, they say, is that it's temporary.
Here's Carmela Coyle. She leads the Maryland Hospital Administration.
Carmela Coyle: We know that we have a booming population, a sicker population and not enough nurses to take care of it.
Coyle is emphatic that those experienced nurses who have stepped up their hours will cut back or retire when the recession ends. That's why hospitals nationwide continue to push nursing as a career.
Coyle: The desire to better coordinate care, the desire to treat the chronically ill in new and better ways, prevention and wellness. All of those things require more nurses than we have available today.
And that's why Coyle says Maryland is the first state to launch a fund-raising campaign for $20 million to get new nurses in the pipeline.
In Baltimore, I'm Cathy Duchamp for Marketplace.
Comments
Comment | Refresh
From florissant, MO, 11/11/2009
Try longterm care most go for the glamor of the hospital, there is none. Longterm care offers a secure field witha growing population. You will never be out of work there. The work can be hard but the rewards are great.
From Chicago, IL, 10/09/2009
I am a fairly new nurse. I've had a few months experience, but after orientation I was required to work all types of crazy shifts I couldn't work. So there went my job. No one is hiring without experience (at least one year) and without a BSN.
From HI, 09/15/2009
Poster #1 - you mean ADN RNs are not getting hired in many places- not RNs per se.
From San Francisco, CA, 07/29/2009
I will also add that many BSN's are getting hired while RN's are not.
From San Francisco, CA, 07/29/2009
I've been searching for a job since graduating in Dec. 2008. All over my State and out of State. I am ready to abandon this frustrating farce of finding a hospital who will accept a new grad.
I enjoyed my last career and will be reapplying. I left on good terms and was told I would always be welcomed back. Once I get rehired I will not return to nursing when the recession ends. It's a great company with great benefits even in this economic downturn.
I wanted to experience a life in the medical profession and help people. I did enjoy it and I can use the information gained by helping family and friends or any emergency situation. And that feels good.
From Auburn, ME, 07/26/2009
According to government reports compiled before this recession, there are 600,000 licensed RNs in this country who are not working. Why? The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration has said that it's largely due to dissatisfaction with wages and lousy working conditions. Many of those nurses have had no choice but to go back to work in this economy, and they'll surely leave their jobs again once the recession eases. Let's stop focusing exclusively on how to educate new nurses and focus on the real problem: Veteran nurses are fed up. We've got to address the issues that are driving them out of hospitals. If we don't, we'll always be faced with a faux shortage.
From VA, 07/25/2009
I don't think that the issue is a nursing "shortage" - the issue is that due to the downturn in the economy hospitals just aren't hiring nurses right now. Even though there have been several nurses leave the unit I work for recently, we haven't been able to hire replacements because of a hiring freeze. So we all work a little harder, people pick up extra shifts, and there's more floating to other units, which leads to stress, fatigue and burn-out. If this economy ever turns itself around, I predict that the nursing shortage will be worse than ever because the stressed out/burned out nurses will leave their jobs, those who had intended to retire before the recession will now be able to retire, and those who went back to full-time employment will cut back their hours or leave completely. And this will be just at the time when all of those baby boomers will be needing more medical care in elderly years.
From CAry, NC, 07/25/2009
My business partner and I attended the Nursing Solutions Summit in DC on June 12 and heard Buerhaus and other experts talk about solutions. The "elephant in the room" was that no one was talking about the key solution, the nurses themselves. Until health care organizations and the nurses themselves attend to their intrinsic needs - life balance, values, purpose, practicing self care before patient care and living their passion, the revolving door will continue.
From Atlanta, GA, 07/25/2009
In my opinion, the "nursing shortage" was actually a shortage of nurses who WEre willing to tolerate the understaffing, lack of support, mismanagement, outdated and nonworking equipment, antiquated systems, overwhelming amounts of paperwork, learning new computer charting, learning new computer medication dispensers, outrageous patient loads and demands to get out on time, all of which take the nurse away from what she came to do, patient care. During a work shift, I value the few minutes I get to spenc with each patient. Then I have to fill in forms on paper, sometimes in duplicate and triplicate, then on the computer in several different places. If the institutions cared about patient care as much as their bottom lines, maybe there would not have been a shortage of nurses willing to put up with this. It took a recession to bring desparate people back to work to accept what normally would have been intolerable conditions. If you family needs food, you will put up with whateveer the employer hands you. I became a nurse at the age of 48 because I wanted to help people. I am not sure if I am helping or harming by contributing to the farce that they are getting good care.
From new haven, CT, 07/24/2009
Your short feature on nursing omitted the layoffs of nursing staff happening all over the US presently. This is not surprising considering that 53% of American hospitals are operating at a negative margin. Recent articles in the WSJ and the Washington Post have reference layoffs as a factor in the shortage of nursing jobs. I find it both frustrating and perplexing that the reporter chose not to interview or quote any professional organization of nurses for their take on this situation. Why did she not contact the ANA or the National Nurses' Organizing Committee?
From Ann Arbor, MI, 07/24/2009
Great story, however one salient point was over looked. Here in the midwest at least, hospitals are struggling with the bottom line and are NOT hiring nurses. There are hiring freezes in place at almost all the large hospitals. There are a few new hospitals opening in the greater Detroit area who are hiring and they are the only places new nurses are finding jobs. The outlook is grime as more and more are unemployed, causing more under and uninsured consumers to use the hospitals. In the past there have been numerous opportunities for nurses. One has only to look at the Sunday paper job adds to note that there are no postings. It's ironic that the government and industry are pushing for people to retrain into yet another area where jobs are non-existant for now.
Another reason fewer nursing jobs are available is because not only are non-working nurses returning to the labor market, those of retirement age are not doing so. Many need to work longer due to retirement fund loses or to retain benefits.
Post a Comment: Please be civil, brief and relevant.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. All comments are moderated. Marketplace reserves the right to edit any comments on this site and to read them on the air if they are extra-interesting. Please read the Comment Guidelines before posting.
You must be 13 or over to submit information to American Public Media. The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party. For more information see Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.