It is a wonderful time for nursing. There are so many opportunities for everyone who chooses this profession. From Nurse Anesthetists, Practitioners, and Educators; the choices are endless. As more and more nurses join the workforce, we need to also protect the bedside nurse. Very many nurses are jumping into going back to school and the new nurses are doing faster than ever before.
SO, what does this do for the nursing shortage,? It certainly does not fix the coming situation.
The new nurses are much less resilient and very much less tolerant of current workplace conditions. They seldom work to fix it, they just see the greener pastures of furthering their education and work towards leaving the bedside. The massive push to quickly graduate new nurses that was aimed to replace retiring nurses, certainly looks to be back-firing. As it gets easier and easier for nurses to choose other pathways, we have to find a way to also encourage and make it beneficial for nurses to stay at the bedside. Do what you can to make changes in the workplace that make it intolerable to stay at the bedside while you are there.
I still love what I do at the bedside, and love giving excellent care. All of the peripherals, politics, and management leaves me cold; because, I seldom truly feel supported to make the workplace a better place to be. Short staffing is never going to improve if the bedside nurses keep leaving. Again, the managers who feel that nurses are so easily replaceable should maybe just shoot themselves in the foot. Because they are not realistic and they drive nurses away from patient care. They keep increasing patient care loads and not for patient safety or staff satisfaction. Making the nursing shortage a continuous cycle. AND...
Many nurses are getting very close to retirement age, these are the nurses that have stayed at the bedside for decades and longer. They are weathering the past storms and they will not be there for the future hurricane coming.
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