Acute Care Nurses: An Endangered Species?
Our acute care settings are in crisis—staff are physically and emotionally exhausted. And many have decided they can’t take it anymore.
“At the virtual conference of the American Organization for Nursing Leadership (AONL) in July, researcher Peter Buerhaus reported preliminary findings of his study on the impact of the pandemic on the nursing workforce. He reported that a phone survey of over 800 AONL members conducted in May revealed that more than 50% of hospital chief nurse officers were seeing “increased retirements, sick leave, and early exits, including among younger nurses.”— AJN Editorial, September 2021
It’s been no secret that the hospital work environment has been problematic for nurses and patients alike—we know stressed and worn-out clinicians make more errors, and patient care suffers. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine released Keeping Patients Safe: Transforming the Work Environment of Nurses, which discussed workplace staffing and processes as intrinsic to ensuring patient safety. More recently, the National Academy of Medicine published Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being (2019), which noted, “The job demands placed on clinicians are often greater than the job resources available to them; this imbalance can lead to burnout.”
