INQRI Grantee Linda Flynn Quoted in Star-Ledger
The Star-Ledger
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November 13, 2007
HEADLINE: State facing nursing crisis
Survey shows high burnout; staffing shortage looming.
BYLINE: Angela Stewart
Registered nurses in New Jersey are on the brink of exhaustion from "unreasonable" workloads that sometimes cause them to miss important changes in their patients' conditions, according to a survey released Monday.
More than half of the 22,000 registered nurses responding to the survey said they didn't believe there is enough nursing staff in their institutions to provide quality patient care, while one-third said unreasonable workloads had caused them to look for a new job.
"It's not the nursing they don't like, it's the challenges they face in order to do their job," said Linda Flynn of Rutgers College of Nursing in Newark, who led the study that she described as the most comprehensive to date.
New Jersey is facing a nursing shortage of unprecedented proportions, the survey said. It is estimated that by 2020, the supply of registered nurses will be 49 percent below demand, the survey said, resulting in a shortfall of roughly 42,000 full-time equivalent positions.
Workload cited
Research has shown higher staffing levels results in fewer patient problems. But many New Jersey nurses are having to care for as many as six or seven patients a shift, or about double what nurses unions have advocated.
Over the next 10 years, New Jersey will need to replace a third of its approximately 88,000 nurses, though where they will come from is uncertain, the study said.
In New Jersey, for example, nursing schools are turning away students because there aren't enough professors to teach them, Flynn said, since many have reached retirement age in recent years.
"We have to do something to increase our educational capacity and hire more nursing faculty to meet this demand," said Flynn, an assistant professor and director of research at the New Jersey Collaborating Center for Nursing at Rutgers.
Ron Czajkowski, a spokesman for the New Jersey Hospital Association, said in an e-mail statement the shortage of nurses statewide is likely to grow worse as the baby boom generation ages and demands more care.
According to the survey, the average registered nurse in New Jersey is a 50-year-old white female with 24 years of experience who puts in more than 10 hours a day.
'Really, really bad'
More than 40 percent of the nurses responding said their workload prevents them from taking a 30-minute meal break, while one in three said they sometimes miss important changes in their patients' conditions because of demands on their time.
"It's really, really bad. These nurses are working like unbelievable," said Carol Aiken, president of the New Jersey Nurses Union, which represents about 1,400 nurses employed at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston and Kimball Medical Center in Lakewood.
Aiken, however, said most nurses are conscientious enough about patient safety to complete their tasks even if they are off the clock.
"There are nurses who will go punch out and then go back and finish their work," she said.
Almost nine out of 10 of those responding to the survey said they had no regrets about choosing nursing as a profession, saying it gave them the opportunity to help people, almost on a daily basis.
Still, the survey found nurses are frequently the targets of verbal abuse and complaints from patients and that they also suffer work-related injuries. In addition, many nurses said they often lacked support from managers and were rarely commended.
