U.S Nurse shortage is in Crisis: Staff Shortages Put Patients at Risk

... Nursing shortages have long vexed hospitals. But in the year and a half since its ferocious debut in the United States, the coronavirus pandemic has stretched the nation’s nurses as never before, testing their skills and stamina as desperately ill patients with a poorly understood malady flooded emergency rooms. They remained steadfast amid a calamitous shortage of personal protective equipment; spurred by a sense of duty, they flocked from across the country to the newest hot zones, sometimes working as volunteers. More than 1,200 of them have died from the virus.

Now, as the highly contagious Delta variant pummels the United States, bedside nurses, the workhorse of a well-oiled hospital, are depleted and traumatized, their ranks thinned by early retirements or career shifts that traded the emergency room for less stressful nursing jobs at schools, summer camps and private doctor’s offices.

Across the country, the shortages are complicating efforts to treat hospitalized coronavirus patients, leading to longer emergency room waiting times and rushed or inadequate care as health workers struggle to treat patients who often require exacting, round-the-clock attention, according to interviews with hospital executives, state health officials and medical workers who have spent the past 17 months in the trenches.

The staffing shortages have a hospital-wide domino effect. When hospitals lack nurses to treat those who need less intensive care, emergency rooms and I.C.U.s are unable to move out patients, creating a traffic jam that limits their ability to admit new ones. One in five I.C.U.s are at least 95 percent capacity, according to an analysis by The New York Times, a level experts say makes it difficult to maintain standards of care for the very sick.

“When hospitals are understaffed, people die,” said Patricia Pittman, director of the Health Workforce Research Center at George Washington University.

Oregon’s governor has ordered 1,500 National Guard troops to help tapped-out hospital staff. Officials in a Florida county where hospitals are over capacity are urging residents “to consider other options” before calling 911. And a Houston man with six gunshot wounds had to wait a week before Harris Health, one of the country’s largest hospital systems, could fit him in for surgery to repair a shattered shoulder. ...

Many experts fear the exodus will accelerate as the pandemic drags on and burnout intensifies. Multiple surveys suggest that nurses are feeling increasingly embattled: the unrelenting workloads, the moral injury caused by their inability to provide quality care, and dismay as emergency rooms fill with unvaccinated patients, some of whom brim with hostility stoked by misinformation. Nurses, too, are angry — that so many Americans have refused to get vaccinated. “They feel betrayed and disrespected,” Professor Buerhaus said. ...