October 5, 2024

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Acute shortage of nurses deepens healthcare crisis across US

Acute shortage of nurses deepens healthcare crisis across US
University Hospital, Camden Division, ambulances and emergency trucks rush to the emergency room at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. [AP Photo/Mel Evans]

There is an acute shortage of nurses in hospitals and care facilities across the United States, with the total deficit of nurses numbering in the hundreds of thousands since the beginning of the pandemic. A 2023 survey by AMN Healthcare found that 94 percent of nurses said there is a shortage of nurses in their area, with half saying the shortage is “severe.” This crisis is trending in an increasingly dangerous direction, with up to 900,000 nurses expected to drop out of the workforce by 2027, in large part from burnout.

The shortage of nurses in the US is already at its worst in four decades and, even counting new nurses entering the workforce, is expected by the Bureau of Labor to widen by hundreds of thousands of nurses per year. The International Council of Nurses (ICN) last year described the global nurse shortage as a “global health emergency.”

Nurses working at care facilities, and particularly hospitals, are already working in conditions of chronic understaffing. This exacerbates the widespread burnout of nurses, including the 47 percent of nurses reporting high levels of burnout in the average US hospital, according to the publication STAT, and the two out of three nurses nationwide who report having to take care of too many patients, according to a nationwide “State of Nursing Poll 2024” by Incredible Health.

The WSWS spoke to a nurse who works at Nashoba Valley Medical Center in Ayer, Massachusetts. Nashoba is one of two facilities, the other being Carney Hospital in Dorchester, that Steward Health Care has announced will be closed by the end of August. Dallas-based Steward filed for bankruptcy in May. The for-profit healthcare giant’s predatory and parasitic financial dealings have enriched its executives to the tune of $1 billion, while healthcare workers and patients are paying the price.

The nurse said, “Well, all the social workers on the unit I work on, the GPU (Geriatric Psychiatric Unit), all quit, about a month ago, so there’s no social workers on the unit.

“The way it works, is if you have 15 patients or under, you get three nurses. And if you go over 15, we’re supposed to have four nurses on the 3 to 11 shifts. So, over the course of the last year, people have quit, and they haven’t refilled the positions. I think the last person that they hired was in maybe November or December.”

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