The shortage is being driven by two factors: dissatisfied nurses leaving hospitals and fewer young women entering the profession. About fifteen years ago, with the advent of managed care, hospitals came under extraordinary pressure to cut costs and began slashing nursing staffs. As a result of the increased workloads, many nurses feel that hospitals have become their own worst enemy, constantly hiring new nurses and then watching them walk out the door.
"After nurses work for a year, they get out," Patterson says. "They get tired and burn out."
Mark Manger
Bernie Patterson was a leader in the failed effort to
unionize St. Anthony Hospital.
Mark Manger
Denver Health nurse Mike Kingsbury wants the
hospital to offer better working conditions.
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When Patterson lobbied for national legislation, she told lawmakers that "the nursing shortage did not cause understaffing -- understaffing caused the nursing shortage."
Everyone seems to have a story of a good nurse being mistreated by hospital management and leaving. Elston says one nurse he worked with had seventeen years' experience and then went through a bitter divorce. "She told them I need time off, I need to take six weeks to get my head together. They said, 'We can't do it,' and she quit. It seems to me that after seventeen years, a nurse is entitled to a sabbatical, especially under those circumstances. She was doing a great job. What did they gain by losing her?"
"The attitude is, 'If you don't like it, you can leave,'" Kingsbury adds. "What's happened is people have voted with their feet and gone out of the profession."
The people who are most affected by overwhelmed nurses are those who have the hardest time speaking up: seriously ill patients.
Wrobel is still upset over a situation she encountered five years ago, when her father was in a local hospital dying of kidney failure. He was incontinent and needed to be changed.
"I was trying to get him help one day, and I couldn't find a nurse. I found an aide and said, 'Please help me.' She said okay and then left for thirty minutes."
Wrobel decided she had no choice but to change her father herself.
"I wasn't going to let him lie there in his own stuff. He was so modest; my dad would never let me see him nude. He was all doped up on pain medication, but there was a point where he looked at me, and I could tell he was saying, 'I'm sorry.' I was so angry at that hospital."
Now Wrobel is working with the Denver Nurse Alliance, lobbying for legislation to change hospital working conditions.
"I want to change other people's experiences," she says.
