Nursing shortage

Although it's only been a few months of school,I've been exposed to many issues regarding health care - one of them being the extreme nursing shortage in Canada. Before I enrolled into the program, I had heard that there was a nursing shortage, which partly influenced me to make this career decision. But I didn't know that it was this bad, and after learning about it in class, I realized just how serious the problem is. In class I learned that the current nurse to patient ratio is 1:25, which leads to problems we refer to as "burnout" where nurses get too tired, or "burn out" like a match, due to their large work/responsibility load and lack of help.

Because of undesirable working conditions and frequent burnouts, nurses are finding it better to leave for another job. On top of that, the older and more experienced RNs are nearing retirement, leaving the younger nurses with the aging baby-boom population.
Learning about this makes me want to be in more of a hurry to graduate so that I can help them out. At the moment, they say that there is little attraction into the nursing profession, and even if attraction did rise, there would be insufficient faculty to meet the growing applicants into nursing school. Here's a fact for you: 40% of the RNs in the province is 50 years of age or older, so we will be expecting a huge operational gap when these RNs retire (Fedorchuk, 2007). The problem just seems to go in circles!

I would have to disagree though, about the lack of attraction in this field. Nurses are gaining respect from the public, and it helps if nurses in the hospital provide caring relationships. Everyone is affected because people get sick sooner or later. A nice relationship will create a memorable hospital visit, and perhaps inspire the younger generations to pursue the nursing profession.

The decrease in RNs mean that nurses will have a bigger work load, meaning less time to rest, and weaker concentration when working with clients. They would not have the heart for a caring relationship either. This issue cannot be ignored, because one day it will affect you!

Fedorchuk, Sarah. (2007). Saskatchewan Has 985,859 Reasons To Say Yes To More RNs. SRNA Newsbulletin, 9(1), 9.

Here's a short but effective video on nursing shortage: