Nurses need to Take Care of Nurses-6 cont.

True retention programs need to be instituted, that reward experience and learning. In doing research on the internet and reading professional magazines, there doesn’t seem to be a retention program that is working.

It was not too many years ago, that it seemed to be a trend to weed out experienced nurses for newer “less expensive nurses” and that has only increased the shortage and not made the situation any better.

Now graduate nurses are making only a few dollars less than nurses with many years of experience. That is not only insulting it is ludicrous. That someone with no experience is more highly valued than well-experienced and learned nurses. It is understood that the field of nursing needs to be made more attractive to welcome people into the field, there also needs to be a higher value placed on the nurses who have stayed in the field through good times and bad, continued to learn new skills and maintain previously learned skills, and tolerated years of callous and often seemingly uncaring management. There need to be programs to bring back older nurses, who can more likely than not renew old skills and learn new ones, than the new nurses coming in. The way nursing staffing and other issues are now, will only drive them back out of the field, and if you look at the way it is going, it will drive out the new nurses too.

“Reality Shock” is just as prevalent as it has always been in this field, as the short-staffing, challenges and responsibilities continue to grow, disproportionate to “joys of nursing” not to mention the wages and benefits of this profession.

So many institutions of caring have long seemed to feel that nurses are easily replaceable, “a dime a dozen”. This attitude is one of the biggest factors in creating the shortage nursing now faces. They have persisted in stretching staffing to the point of unsafe work situations; they rarely have true standards in place to protect the nurse-patient ratio to the patient’s best interest. Usually it is in the interest of the institutions budget, not the patients’ right to receive the care they come in for and deserve.