Solutions to State’s Nursing Shortage
Re “Looming Crisis in Nursing,” editorial, May 21: The nursing shortage has many causes: increased workload due to sicker patients in fewer hospitals; lower budget for bedside care due to lower reimbursement and greater drug and technology costs; competing vocations, including advanced practice nursing and greater pay for nurse administrators; and a dumbing down of daily chores due to charting requirements.
Medicare, the California Department of Health Care Services and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals have developed requirements for documentation that consume up to 20% of nursing staff time. These requirements are forced upon nurses without any evidence that they improve patient care. If you don’t believe me, ask to see your complete hospital chart. Less than one-fifth of the information is even remotely useful!
An immediate 50% reduction in documentation requirements would increase the bedside nursing work force by 10%. This would give some relief while looking to longer-term solutions.
Victor L. Kovner MD
Studio City
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On the day I read your editorial detailing our drastic current and future shortage of nurses, I received the USC Health Science Center newsletter, with its notice that USC’s School of Nursing has been closed to all future admissions. Departments of nursing, with faculties and student bodies composed mostly of women, never carry much weight in the halls of academia. In addition, they don’t often bring in the big-ticket federal grants that universities increasingly depend on.
Nonetheless, this decision by the USC administration is one that is entirely wrong for the needs of our times.
Jean K. Moore
Los Angeles
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“Looming Crisis in Nursing” followed the editorial “A United Defense,” again blasting President Bush for not saving California from our energy crisis. Maybe it’s time, right now, before we get a full-blown nursing crisis and nurses start price-gouging us, for Gov. Gray Davis to cap nursing costs before they too soar out of sight.
Of course, if that results in a shortage of nurses, due to low pay, then he and our two senators can always blame Bush and demand that he force nurses from other states to provide their services in California.
Dick Ettington
Palos Verdes