Describing hospital environments where nurses are unable to take breaks because they are assigned too many patients — some of whom are pleading for care from frontline workers — the president of the American Nurses Association, Dr. Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, said some nurses may think their only option is to strike.
“What I’ve seen is that in areas where we’ve traditionally had good staffing, even they are getting bombarded with patients and a lack of resources,” Sidhu said. Aspiring nurses are lining up to replace those retirees but even that silver lining has hit a snag, with widespread faculty shortages at nursing colleges. In 2021, nearly 92,000 qualified nursing school applicants were denied entry into a program, largely because of a shortage of educators,The American Nurses Association asked Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to declare the nursing shortage a national crisis in late 2021.
“This has been an ongoing issue for a while,” Mensik Kennedy said Wednesday. “We really need to work collaboratively with Congress and our health care system to address these issues. Nurses can’t solve these issues by ourselves.” “That sounds like more of an issue of the attractiveness of the working conditions of the jobs,” Auerbach said. “Some of it is outside of the control of the hospitals in those jobs.”
Still, strong interest in the profession led Loyola University New Orleans to start an accelerated program this year aimed at second-career students who already have a bachelor’s degree.