Many of my nursing school classmates are retiring. A few said they were “done” with nursing and health care and with working, and stopped as soon as they were able to afford not working. They keep busy traveling, babysitting grandchildren, or just taking it easy. Some are trying their hand at something totally different—becoming a docent in a museum, for example, or taking courses to be a travel agent.
Keeping a connection to nursing.
Retired nurse Diane McCarthy volunteers in the neonatal ICU at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus. Millennial nurses such as Erin Bergmann (left) say they benefit from having more experienced nurses like McCarthy on the unit. Photo by Kyle Robertson.
Most people I know, however, still want to keep a connection with nursing and have transitioned into part-time or consulting roles. After fulfilling and demanding careers, many older nurses still have a lot to offer and are not ready to completely retire from nursing. As one colleague has aptly termed it, “preferment”—doing what you prefer, when you prefer, and with whom you prefer—and not retirement may be the answer.
In the August issue, authors Ellen Elpern and Joanne Disch write about a hospital program that utilizes retired nurse volunteers to complement existing hospital staff. In “Retired Nurse Volunteers,” they describe how retired nurses can use their expertise and experience in a variety of ways—mentoring and teaching, of course, but also in other creative but essential areas.
Making use of retirees’ extensive expertise and experience.
They encourage hospitals to develop a “retired nurse volunteer corps,” to plan how and in what areas these volunteers can help, how to qualify them, and what institutional policies and processes are needed to recruit and maintain such a cadre of resources.
It’s a worthy idea—and surprising, I think, that more hospitals have not already instituted such programs. With more than 70,000 nurses retiring annually by the end of this decade, Elpern and Disch note (quoting Peter Buerhaus), that hospitals will face “not only a shortage of manpower, but a considerable loss of ‘knowledge, skill, experience, and judgement, all attributes that contribute to the successful clinical and administrative operations of complex health care delivery systems.'”
(The article will be free to read for the month.)
I read this article with interest, but my old sorrow came back. I wondered what the author has to say about those of us who were laid off by our hospital? No real explanation. Just leaves those of us who are among many, to guess or wonder–after 20 or 30 years in our area of nursing, why? My guess, after about 7 yrs. is that we were too old, and at the top of our pay scale, costing too much to pay. Here in the Midwest, many nurses have been laid off, and in some places, continue to be laid off. It hurts. Especially to read an article like this, and feelings are raw again. We wish that someone valued us, like (supposedly) some nurses in some places–NOT in the Midwest, I would guess. I am refocusing on history and the Civil War. Something totally different from nursing, where I am not at risk of being escorted out of the building, like some nurses being laid off.
I’m sure that I will not be the first to point out that if hospitals weren’t so eager to get rid of older (read: more expensive) seasoned nurses in favor of all those younger /on the lower rungs of the novice-to-expert ladder, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising that they would jump at the chance to have all that wisdom and institutional memory now … for free.
Here’s hoping that those of us with more hard-learned radical ideas and perspectives from the trenches pass along not only clinical wisdom, but attitudes regarding pay, working hours and conditions, patient-nurse ratios, clinical supports, and unionization as major factors in quality of patient care. If so, this movement could result in more than benefit to the hospital bottom line and more to, like, actual nurses.
We should strike while this iron is hot. Because, after all, while they can’t threaten a volunteer with loss of a paying job, they can, and will, use the time-tested “reduction in hours” for any hint of rabble-rousing.