The Myth Of The Nursing Shortage Paper

Workforce Issues in Nursing

Workforce Issues in Nursing
The article is titled “The Myth of the Nursing Shortage” and it tells about the experience of a graduate nurse and her difficulty finding a job. This is why it refers to the nursing shortage as being a “myth”. It also mentions the difficulty LPN’s and ADN’s are having finding jobs in middle of a severe shortage that is supposed to get worse. The purpose of this paper is to address issues of the nursing shortage and hiring practices of new nurses. (Casselman, 2013). To a lay person, this may seem confusing. How can a profession turn away its fresh blood in the midst of a shortage? The article mentions the recession as being a large reason. Many nurses
Actually I was talked into it by the director of nurses of the hospital I was currently working at. The hospital held a lunch and advertised free nursing school to any of the ancillary medical staff working in respiratory, radiology, pharmacy, EMS and the LVNs. About 15 of us took the bait but only 3 of us graduated. We all began our two year contract requirement in the step down ICU units and eventually began working in the ED and other ICU units. It was the hardest two years I ever worked. Of the three of us I am the only one still in nursing. The other two went back to being paramedics. It took me roughly five years to finally quit only to return to nursing again because of economic hardship. After about four months of being unable to find a full time position, I settled on an agency job. The hospitals I was working agency with were short staffed yet I could only get a job with them through agency. I worked for agency making more than full-time staff, but I needed the benefits. I worked in PRN pools and agency for over a year before I finally landed a full-time PACU
Many new graduates I had met during this time said they been looking for jobs much longer and because of their lack of experience, they couldn’t even work for an agency while they waited. The whole idea of turning away trained people who want to work in a field that has a severe shortage seems backwards. Although, looking closer at the job market, there was truly a severe shortage of nurses. Only experienced nurses (Huston, 2014, p71). New nurses, whether they were LVN, RN’s with associates degrees or bachelor’s degrees where having the same experience of not being able to catch a break in the nursing job market (Casselman, 2013). Because of this, many new graduate nurses are left wondering if there really is a nursing shortage. If so, how can someone with no experience become experienced before the shortage becomes worsen. These same nurses once they do get jobs will then find out and experience aspects of job dissatisfaction. Long hours, mandatory overtime on one week then cancelled the next. Not to mention the stress, working nights, weekends and holidays with dissatisfied patients, grumpy doctors and impatient co-workers. Once these nurses do become experienced as nurses, the also become experienced in “burnout” and move to different areas of nursing or leave the profession entirely (Huston, 2014,