Stressed nurses need intensive care, survey says
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, May 6, 2001
By Bill Bergstrom
Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA — One of every three U.S. nurses surveyed under age 30 planned to leave their jobs within the next year, reflecting growing frustration among hospital nurses to the point of burnout, a new survey finds.
Hospital nurses suffer what they consider inadequate numbers of nurses, rising patient loads, declining quality of patient care and even verbal abuse directed at them on the job, according to the study being published today in the May-June issue of the health policy journal Health Affairs.
More than 43 percent scored high on a "burnout inventory" used to measure emotional exhaustion and the extent to which they felt overwhelmed by their work. More than half said they had been subjected to verbal abuse.
"A lot of people were saying to us that the equivalent of ‘ward rage’ was occurring in hospitals," said Linda Aiken, director of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research. The center oversaw the survey of 43,329 registered nurses at 711 hospitals in five countries in 1998 and 1999.
"The nurses receive the brunt of that frustration because they are the only professionals who are there around the clock," said Aiken, a professor of nursing and sociology.
Aiken said hospitals need to offer personnel policies and benefits comparable to those offered by other businesses — such as better advancement, lifelong learning opportunities and flexible work schedules — if they are to retain qualified nurses, rather than relying on "popular short-term strategies such as signing bonuses and use of temporary personnel."
The American Hospital Association and its affiliated American Organization of Nurse Executives agree that "nurses have one of the toughest jobs in America," said Pam Thompson, executive director of the nurse executives’ group.
In Seattle, nurses rallied downtown Sunday to highlight concerns about the nursing shortage, workplace safety and forced overtime. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., was keynote speaker for the gathering organized by the state’s three largest nursing unions: Washington State Nurses Association; Service Employees International Union, 1199 NW; and United Food and Commercial Workers Local 141.
Improving working conditions is difficult because of shortages of people qualified for the jobs and financial constraints on the health care industry in general, Thompson said.
"We are trying to take a limited amount of dollars and … looking at how to use those resources in the best way possible," she said.
One of every three hospitals nationally and three of every four hospitals in Pennsylvania are losing money on patient care, partly because of limited reimbursements from Medicaid, Medicare and private insurers, said Roger Baumgarten, spokesman for the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania.
Thompson said more support staff may be needed in hospitals so that nurses "can focus on the jobs they are trained for."
That would address one big frustration the study found. More than 40 percent of the U.S. nurses surveyed said they did non-nursing tasks such as delivering food trays or transporting patients.
Of the U.S. nurses, 44.8 percent said quality of care at their hospitals had deteriorated in the past year, compared with 44.6 percent in Canada, 27.6 percent in England, 21.5 percent in Scotland, and 17.2 percent in Germany.
The researchers surveyed 13,471 acute care hospital nurses in the United States, 17,450 in Canada, 5,006 in England, 4,721 in Scotland and 2,681 in Germany.
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