To Solve the U.S. Nursing Shortage Crisis, the Country Must Change Its Immigration Policies

The United States is about to learn the hard way what happens when an entire generation of nurses retires without enough new clinicians to fill their shoes at the bedside. As a result, hospitals in the same country that performed the first successful kidney transplant and pioneered anesthesia and heart rhythm restoration will have no choice but to ration care. That’s the only way to describe what happened to an Alabama man who was turned away from 43 different hospitals across three different states before ultimately dying of a cardiac emergency 200 miles from home because no nearby system had an available intensive care bed it could staff. A spokesman for one hospital said the man “needed medical services that were not available.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] And it’s what happened to expecting mothers in Idaho earlier this year when the only hospital in the 8,000-person city of Emmett said it had become “unsustainably expensive to recruit and retain a full team of high-quality, broad-spectrum nurses to work.” That followed an earlier decision by an upstate New York facility to pause its maternity services after struggling to recruit enough replacements to offset staff resignations and retirements. The terrifying reality is that providers in every corner of the country have closed beds, units, and even entire facilities over an inability to adequately staff bedsides. A nurse old enough to retire today has only known the U.S...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized freelance health Source Type: news