viewpoint
In My State, No Instructors Means No Nurses

A hospital near my practice in Rhode Island is paying bonuses to recruit new nurses and offering an additional bonus for anyone who lasts more than a year. Still, positions go begging.

I have three student nurses in my surgicenter, but they were not placed there in a clinical rotation. Instead, they are working full-time in various other capacities. Their curriculum requires that a core academic program be followed by clinical training. All three have completed their academic program. So have almost 1,500 other students in this state. How can this be, more than a thousand nursing students and no one to fill the nursing jobs?

Nationwide, there are many reasons for the nursing shortage. But where I am, the problem isn't that people don't want to be nurses. Nor is the problem that when nurses are trained they rush to some specialty niche, leaving the traditional jobs unfilled.

Code Blue

The problem we face locally is more critical: We don't have enough teachers. Many of the nursing instructors have retired. (The average age of the nurses working in my surgicenter and in the operating rooms of our local hospitals is about 50.) After the students finish their classroom programs they have plenty of hospital wards available to them, but not enough clinical instructors to teach and guide them.

The various reasons why seasoned nurses have left the profession -- pay, long hours, double shifts, and burnout -- have reached so far down into the nursing ranks that we have dropped below the critical number of senior nurses with enough skill, experience and desire to be the teachers and role models for today's students.

How sad this is, that the turmoil in this profession has driven away one generation before it had a chance to train the next. One can only hope that the nursing teachers still working inspire enough followers to become teachers themselves before time runs out. With just a few dozen teachers, we could have 1,500 new nurses very quickly.