Delaware County Daily Times, May 26, 2004
Editorial: Nursing shortage reaching critical stage
Last week the Pennsylvania Department of Health in cooperation with the Department of State's
Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs released results of a survey that confirmed a
suspicion long recognized by health-care providers.
Registered nurses in Pennsylvania are aging and very few are waiting in the wings to take their place.
According to the survey, the average age for Pennsylvania nurses is 45.4 years. One-third of the younger nurses
reported a desire to leave nursing. Twenty-seven percent under the age of 35 want to leave nursing in the next 10 years.
Local hospital administrators are trying to remedy the shortage by aggressively recruiting nurses, often luring them
away from neighboring hospitals with signing bonuses and education benefits.
But Teri Evans of Upper Providence, president of the 5,000-member Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurse and
Allied Professionals or PASNAP, places a lot of the blame for the nursing exodus on working conditions.
According to the Pennsylvania health department survey, of the nurses wanting to leave the profession within five years,
31 percent expressed dissatisfaction with their nursing careers and more than 57 percent expressed dissatisfaction with
their jobs.
"We need to improve the conditions in our hospitals if we are going to really end the nursing shortage. Recruitment alone
is clearly not the answer, especially when one-third of the new nurses we are recruiting are making plans to leave
nursing," said Evans.
One of those conditions was addressed Monday in Harrisburg at a state Senate judiciary committee hearing on Senate
Bill 722/House Bill 1400 that would ban mandatory overtime for nurses except in the case of declared or mass emergencies.
Bill Cruice, executive director of PASNAP which
represents about 1,200 registered nurses in Delaware County, said the primary concern about mandatory
overtime is patient safety.
"Nurses are prone to make medical errors if they are made to work long hours beyond their major shifts,"Cruice said.
According to the Pennsylvania health department
survey, more than 25 percent of registered nurses who reported working mandatory overtime said they were "very
dissatisfied" or "dissatisfied" with their jobs as
compared to 13.8 percent who did not work mandatory overtime.
No Delaware County hospitals require mandatory overtime for their nurses. However, they still suffer from the
nurses' number one complaint of high patient-to-nurse ratio, another working condition for which nurses are seeking a
legislative remedy.
Registered nurses in hospitals with the highest patient-to-nurse ratios are twice as likely to experience job-related
burnout as those working in hospitals with the lowest patient-to-nurse ratios, according to a study done from April 1, 1998, until
Nov. 30, 1999, by Linda Aiken, nursing professor and director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at
the University of Pennsylvania.
Aiken found that for each additional patient over four in a nurse's workload, the risk of death increased by
7 percent for surgical patients and that patients in hospitals with eight patients per nurse had a 31 percent greater risk
of