Despite incentives and sign-on bonuses of up to $30,000 being offered to new nurses for their first two years, Renown Regional Health is still experiencing a shortage in this fundamental medical position, according to multiple employees at the hospital.
COVID, which caused a decrease of nurses and a lower amount of those going to nursing schools, intensified a pressing need to hire and train more medical professionals. The pandemic increased already high workloads and stress levels, with several nurses we spoke to saying they are considering a new line of work, or taking time off to think about their options.
A campaign to hire 500 more nurses and physicians across Northern Nevada was introduced last February by Renown, in a push to meet the needs of the community, but those have fallen short so far.
In an email response, Caroline Ackerman, the Manager of Communications & Public Affairs at Renown, said that employees have “felt the burden of picking up additional shifts to ensure [they] have the coverage needed to care for our community.”
At the time of our recent interview, Ackerman said that 147 new employees had been hired since the February campaign launched.
Meanwhile, departures also continue. The average age of nurses is becoming older, with early to mid-career nurses often looking for higher paying, lower stress jobs with insurance agencies or health consultant companies.
For nurses who already work 12 hour shifts, the burnout can come on quickly. The same goes for CNAs, or certified nursing assistants. These clinical employees are essential to registered nurses and patients, changing out patients’ clothing, taking vitals and cleaning up patients’ rooms.
Natasha Marko, a CNA apprentice at Renown, explains that bedside burnout, which can range from a mental health drain to worrying that you haven’t done enough for the patients under your care, has become a serious issue for clinical workers.
“We do the dirty work,” Marko says, when describing the work that she does as a CNA apprentice. Having about 12 patients at a time to clean up and check in on, a long shift can become “grueling,” she said.
She doesn’t feel her growth is being encouraged either, and that others around her at Renown give her indications they want her to stay in the position she is in now.
“Since I started being a nursing apprentice, they said, ‘don’t go to nursing school, you don’t want to do it.’” This reflects a structural problem of fewer incoming nurses.
At the state level, it’s estimated Nevada has 4,000 fewer nurses than the national average in terms of RN to population average. One solution which has been proposed is to create a nursing compact, which allows licensed nurses, in good standing in their home state, to practice in any other compact state, of which there are already 39.
Union leaders oppose this saying it’s the local working conditions which need to be improved first and foremost to address the nursing shortage.
During the pandemic, the trend of hiring more expensive travel nurses also took off, to follow where the COVID hotspots were, but with pay disparity, and a mercenary attitude, this created jealousy and further broke down local systems with local nurses also leaving for these positions, according to several nurses who spoke to us anonymously.
Another idea is to increase the pay of nurses in academia, to give a new boost to nursing schools facing their own shortages and decreased enrollment.
At the Congressional federal level, Rep. Nanette Barragán (CA-44) recently introduced the Support Faculty and Expand Access to Nursing School Act to provide grant funding through the Department of Health and Human Services to nursing schools to allow them to expand their capacity to train nurses by hiring more nursing faculty. With a divided Congress though, analysts say it’s a long shot.
The current situation has led to a thriving criminal industry of bogus nurses with fake diplomas, further complicating the search for competent, qualified nurses.
“We just need more pay and more of us to divide the work,” one of them who is thinking of taking a break and getting another degree told us anonymously.