This isnt intended to be political, though politics clearly play a role in some of the challenges mentioned. I saw an article that focuses on the challenges of nursing in MS right now and thought some here may find it interesting. A similar story is playing out in hospitals across the country, but it appears some of the challenges mentioned are unique to MS.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/health/covid-mississippi-nurses.html Its a paywall, but if you stop the page from loading, you can read the full article. Sometimes it takes a few refresh and stop attempts. Main points are below. Bold is me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/23/health/covid-mississippi-nurses.html Its a paywall, but if you stop the page from loading, you can read the full article. Sometimes it takes a few refresh and stop attempts. Main points are below. Bold is me.
“We have staff members dropping like flies from Covid so there was no way I was going to leave her on the side of the road,” Ms. Sison said a few hours later as she walked the corridors of her 350-bed hospital, which has been steadily filling with Covid patients after a monthslong lull.
On Sunday, 106 coronavirus patients were being treated at Singing River Health System, a county-owned network of three small hospitals along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, up from a dozen or so patients at the beginning of the month. With 40 percent of all Covid-19 tests in Pascagoula coming back positive and about 100 hospital employees out sick, Ms. Sison was trying not to think about what the coming days would bring.
At Pascagoula Hospital, the city’s only acute-care health facility, a wave of departures has left 80 unfilled openings for registered nurses, forcing administrators to mothball a third of its beds. By the end of last week, every remaining bed was full, prompting an alarming systemwide backup.
The nation’s frontline medical workers were running on fumes even before the arrival of Omicron. Successive waves of illness and death have left them exhausted and numb; nearly one in five have left the profession over the past two years. And they are angry — at the patients who refuse to get vaccinated, at the hospital executives who won’t spend the money needed to maintain safe nurse-to-patient ratios, and at the political leaders who call them “health care heroes” while opposing mask and vaccine mandates that might blunt the tsunami of new infections.Continue reading the main storyThe labor shortage has been especially brutal for the small, nonprofit safety-net hospitals like Singing River where millions of Americans seek care. Financially fragile even before the pandemic, they have been unable to match the lofty salaries dangled by travel nurse agencies and large health systems, further accelerating the personnel drain that threatens their ability to provide quality care. Travel nurses can make more than $200 an hour, far more than the $30 earned by most staff nurses in Mississippi.
The labor shortage has been especially brutal for the small, nonprofit safety-net hospitals like Singing River where millions of Americans seek care. Financially fragile even before the pandemic, they have been unable to match the lofty salaries dangled by travel nurse agencies and large health systems, further accelerating the personnel drain that threatens their ability to provide quality care. Travel nurses can make more than $200 an hour, far more than the $30 earned by most staff nurses in Mississippi.
The financial strain has been exacerbated by the refusal of Mississippi and other southern states to embrace Medicaid expansion. For Mississippi, that would mean an additional $600 million in annual federal aid, according to the state economist, and an additional 11,000 new jobs each year, most of them in health care.
Gov. Tate Reeves and other Republican leaders who dominate the state’s government have also resisted calls to devote a significant portion of federal coronavirus relief aid for bonuses that could help stanch health care worker departures.
Kelly Cumbest, 45, a registered nurse who manages patient care in the E.R., said that in recent months he had received only one application for 24 openings in his department. “It’s not just Omicron that worries us,” he said. “What scares us is that we don’t have people to take care of heart attacks, strokes and car accidents, and that’s something the politicians and general public really don’t understand.”
For a while, a dogged loyalty to community went a long way in persuading many nurses to stay put, despite wages that are among the lowest in the country and the worrisome rates of vaccination. Just 46 percent of county residents are fully immunized.
That devotion began to dim during the calamitous Delta surge last summer, when administrators were, for the first time, forced to hire travel nurses.
The departures have had a pernicious knock-on effect, forcing the hospital to hire even more travel nurses and threatening its already precarious finances. On some days, nearly 80 percent of the nurses on some wards are on short-term contracts, hospital leaders say. As a result, Singing River has racked up $30 million in additional expenses during the pandemic, Mr. Bond, its chief executive, said.
He and other hospital officials have been pressing Mississippi state leaders to use a quarter of $1.8 billion in federal pandemic relief funds to provide $20,000 retention bonuses to nurses who agree to remain in the state for two years. Lawmakers have countered with a far less generous proposal that would fund bonuses of around $1,000.
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