Critical nurse shortage draws a range of prescriptions, diagnoses

Nurses are understaffed, overworked, and burning out

Your editorial “Why can’t nursing schools meet the growing demand for nurses?” misses many of the actual issues facing the nursing profession. My daughter is a nurse at a highly regarded teaching hospital. A recent graduate from nursing school, she began her career in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. For all of her career thus far, she and her fellow nurses have been understaffed and overworked. They also have been underpaid in comparison with travel nurses — some of whom are good, some of whom have no idea what they are doing — who are paid two to three times the rate of a staff nurse.

Many veteran nurses retired amid the pandemic, leaving a lot of new or newish nurses to take leadership roles for which many were not adequately trained or prepared. Occasionally hospital administrators will toss a snack basket or a fleece their way and claim how much they love their nurses, but it does nothing to alleviate the situation on the units. The biggest slap in the face comes when they get an annual pay raise that doesn’t even keep pace with inflation.

No one should have to deal with the stresses today’s nurses face. So you can have nursing schools turning out as many new graduates as possible. But a year or two into their career, their idealistic vision of being a bedside nurse in a highly regarded teaching hospital comes smack into reality, and they might burn out in their mid-20s and leave. Fix that problem and you may fix the nursing shortage.