I’m a guy who got went to night school and earned a LPN license while helping take care of my Dad who had severe dementia for the last 8 years of his life. Most hospitals require an RN license to work there. I’ve tried to find an LPN to RN training program, and even though I have another degree , IV certification, ( and worked as an Aerospace and Medical manufacturing engineer most of my life) , they require about 1 and a 1/2 years of prerequisites before allowing you to enter the program, instead of having these classes sequenced as part of the program. Now if you just want admittance to the RN program they have a point system weighted to SAT scores, community service, and other things that someone who planned for a Nursing career just leaving HS would meet the criteria for. In the outside the hospital industry, it’s heavily LPN’s with one RN supervisor to about 10-20 LPN’s. The RN reviews charting and updates the care plans as doctors orders come in. It’s the RN community that has lobbied in many states to eliminate LPN’s ( Licensed Practical Nurses = low paid nurses). Keep the high paid jobs for nurses who have gone through the current university system. Much like engineering did for the PE ( professional engineering license) which used to be open to anyone who could pass the old exhaustive test which stressed real world problems. The new test looks like the same problems in the college textbooks.Now you must have a degree from an accredited University. It’s not what you know, it’s who you have taken courses from. The RN testing is the same way. If you have just graduated you should be able to pass it, and if you don’t on the first try, you can come back again. The professional society scam.
One of our Madison hospitals is trying to Unionize the Nursing staff. (Meriter, I think?)
It’s not going very well for them. Couldn’t even gain any traction during Covid, which was what started it all in the first place.
We have a Cardiac Nurse and a Pharmacist in the family. We’re set. ;)
As a Vet, I use the VA Hospital for my medical care; so far, so good. Have had great doctors and nurses and they run a tight ship.
I never understood the reason why the push for BSN over LPN and Associate degree RN. Part of it is nursing leaders advocating for that, plus the hospitals wanting to have magnet status. I remember nursing in the 80s. It was team nursing with RNs supervising LPNs. That all went away when primary nursing became the focus.
The nursing shortage is a multitude of factors. They are
1. Stress
2. Deliberate short staffing for years
3. Lack of respect by patients and administrators
4. Violence by patients
5. 12 hour shifts on your feet with no breaks excludes older workers because they cannot do that anymore
6. Boomer retirements accelerated during covid
7. Bad treatment to nurses by hospitals during covid- Lack of PPE, staffing shortages, watching people die constantly, no security if you got covid from a patient because covid contracted on the job did not allow you to receive workmen’s compensation
8. Nurses gravitated to travel nursing jobs because it paid more and they had contractually more say in their working conditions. That resulted in even more nurses leaving their job to travel because the pay differences for the same job caused anger with nurses who still remained employed by a hospital.
9. Too few nursing schools because professors got paid less than a floor nurse
10. Too few staff in nursing homes because they all quit ,too. Conditions in nursing homes are horrible. That caused backups in hospitals unable to discharge patients to nursing homes.
11. Staff shortages in hospitals during covid resulted in new nursing school graduates to be thrown out there with little training causing burnout early and they quit the profession
Its not the vaccine causing this. The main issue is short staffing done by hospital administrators over many years. When covid hit, the underlying problems became insurmountable.
.
You mean just like attorneys?