There is a nursing shortage and a greater one looming as the experienced nurses working today will be the ones to retire tomorrow.
The world needs bedside nurses and the nursing situations many nurses currently find themselves working in too frequently involves unsafe staffing with little or NO ancillary staff to ease the burden. This, along with perpetual increases in responsibilities and expectations in our practice put the bedside nurse in a less than enviable position too many nights in a row. Patient care suffers when there is not enough staff. Patient satisfaction dwindles in relation to increased nursing pressures and decreased nursing satisfaction. Study after study has shown this.
The nurses graduating so easily and frequently in what is supposed to be a solution to the nursing shortage are not staying at the bedside. So, when the nurses you work with today retire and the new nurses move on to the very many opportunities now available, who will be the bedside nurse?
Older nurses have weathered and tolerated the "nurses are easily replaceable and of little value" attitudes of those in power many times over the decades. Each time nursing schools mass produce new nurses, managers actually do all they can to devalue their experienced nurses, thinking that all the new nurses will be the replacements. However, time after time, the experienced nurses have stayed and the new ones have left for often easier and greener pastures. Now they don't even have to leave the profession but obtain higher education that only gets easier and easier. When they "Don't Like it" today they very easily leave. WHO will be the bedside nurse?
WHO will be the Bedside Nurse?
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