Nursing shortage

Today I would like to discuss the apparent nursing shortage that we have been having in America. It is getting very dicey out there in the medical world. Right now the patient to nurse or C.N.A ratio is pretty high. There are way more patients than nurses and the result is poor medical care.

The same thing is happening with the nursing assistants. Very often they have to take care of up to 35 patients at a time on a scheduled work week. The funny thing is that more people are running into the nursing assistant profession than ever. I would have to suspect that they found out that it is really not as glamorous as the instructors make it seem during class. This is a profession that you would really have to be doing it for years, because you really want to help the elderly and the sick.

It is not a beautiful job as they make it seem when you are studying it. There should actually be a law passed that states that C.N.A's should be responsible for about eight people at a time. Unfortunately, that will not be anything that happens for a long time, since the state licensing board seems to think that the amount of people C.N.A's take care of now is actually over the staff limit. I just want people to really think about this for a moment. Suppose you or a loved one happened to be really sick and needed to be in the hospital for a while, and maybe even needed to live in a nursing home for rehab for a while. The shortage of nursing could affect the type of care that they are given and it could even cost them their life due to this fact.

The reason why this should become every one's concern is, because whenever a nurse has to work short she has to take care of even more patients. This causes fatigue, it can cause depression, it can even delay the amount of time patients get much needed medication. This would not be an issue if we had more nurses working on the floor. Now the latest thing that is happening, is that more and more C.N.A's are going back to school and becoming nurses. I have also joined the reigns of going back to school for nursing. This really helps the situation, and if more and more good C.N.A's do this then this will not only help with the nursing shortage, but it will also drive back up the rate of pay for nursing assistants all over the country. Since everyone is flocking to go back and become a nursing assistant, this has made the pay drop immensely. Hopefully in five years there won't be as bad a shortage as there is now. There will always be a shortage unfortunately, because people really do not appreciate nurses as well as they should.