PERSPECTIVES: Nurses On Strike
average age of a nurse in the U.S. is over 44 years. Nursing school enrollments are down for the fifth straight year. In 1999 they were down a full five percent from the year before. One federal agency predicts the nursing shortage will peak in 2012. Compounding this issue, we are an aging society. One that will be in increasing need of nursing care, just as the shortage begins to peak.
This is at the heart of the matter. Nurses want and should be seen as respected professionals that contribute much to their society. Not as a bunch of wanna be pros or empty-nesting mothers. Because that is an inaccurate stereotype. We are legally charged with assuring that doctors treat their patients accordingly. We are above all, the patients advocate. But who’s making the money? Well it’s not the doctors, it not the nurses and it’s not even the hospitals. But that makes for a whole different issue.
The Washington Hospital Center sees the stumbling block as the pay. The nurses want a 28.5% pay increase over the next four years and that’s why their holding out. The nurses say they don’t won’t any more mandatory overtime. My question is, where do you think the hospital is going to find these nurses? My question is, how is a professional supposed to support themselves and a family on $50,000 a year? My question is, what is either group doing about it?
In twenty-five years of nursing I can tell you this, our professionals are as much to blame for the shortage of nurses as any other factor in our society. I have not known any other group of professionals that so readily eat their young and spend time undermining their co-workers. And don’t think I’m letting the hospitals and other nursing employers off the hook either. What are they thinking about. My best friend in life is also a nurse, she has worked at the same hospital for 12 years. She has 18 years experience in neonatal intensive care, she is a CCRN in NICU and has earned an average of two percent merit increases annually. What are they thinking about when nurses with half as much experience, whom she’s responsible to orient and train, are hired making ten cents less per hour. What are they thinking about, you haven’t really given anybody a raise, every time you do, it’s been at the expense of benefits. Little
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