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Is There a Nurse in the House?
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Business New Haven
12/11/2000
By: John Florian
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HARTFORD - Where have all the nurses gone? Connecticut's health-care associations want lawmakers and the public to help stop a hemorrhaging of nurses and other health-care workers from the state, which the associations warn is a “growing crisis.”
Connecticut's nursing vacancy rates have increased more than 50 percent in recent years, and have nearly tripled since 1994, reports the Connecticut Hospital Association (CHA). “Hospital operating rooms and critical-care areas are facing the highest vacancy rates - in some cases, over 20 percent,” says Kim Hostetler, the CHA's vice president for human resources.
What's more, help doesn't appear on the horizon. “There are simply not enough nurses in the pipeline now to replace the experienced staff we are losing at an incredibly rapid rate in the next few years,” says Hostetler.
Nurses and other clinical staff are “caring for sicker patients and doing it during shorter lengths of stay,” Hostetler adds. “The bottom line is that while we have grave concerns about our workforce shortages today, the projections for Connecticut's workforce future are frightening.”
The CHA is not alone in this warning. It recently joined forces with other health-care organizations in urging the state's General Assembly to join a public-private partnership to cope with the crisis. Specifically, the goal is to recruit, retrain and train health-care professionals for hospitals, nursing homes and home health-care agencies in the state.
“Connecticut's nursing shortage is reaching crisis proportions and will begin to threaten the quality of health care in the state unless we take immediate action,” warns Toni Fatone, executive vice president of the Connecticut Association of Health Care Facilities.
“We aren't seeing an impact on the quality of care yet, but are beginning to have a problem of access,” adds Virginia Humphrey, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Home Care. Home health agencies have even turned down new patients due to insufficient staffing, she explains.
According to the CHA's Hostetler, Connecticut hospitals remain among the best in the U.S. A recently released national study ranked the state's hospitals sixth in the nation across a broad spectrum of quality indicators. But the shortage in nurses and other health-care workers is of critical concern since it's coming at a time when “demand for health-care has never been greater,” says Hostetler.
“We are simply not attracting young people to the nursing profession,” explains Lloyd Nurick, president of the Connecticut Association of Not-For Profit Providers for the Aging. Nurick says the average age of licensed registered nurses in Connecticut is 48. Nationwide, only nine percent are under age 30.
Connecticut lawmakers were urged to make this problem a top priority in the coming legislative session, much as they did with the teacher shortage of the mid 1980s.
“Connecticut led the nation in addressing the teacher shortage with a strong, creative program to attract and keep talented teachers in our schools,” says Hostetler. “Now we have to make the same kind of effort to attract and educate a new generation of health-care workers.”
The health-care associations also recently mailed 30,000 brochures to Connecticut households, defining the problem and outlining recommendations. Collectively, the associations represent the majority of institutional health-care providers in the state.
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