Why nurses leave the profession

If this is taken away from us or if we do not do this, we will eventually get bored if not tired of the routines that we do over and over again. There need to be variations in our tasks for us to keep going. Thus, if we fail to grow professionally, what will actually happen is we will either hate our job or quit our jobs. Regardless of one, a combination of two, or all these variables that have had played a part of why nurses leave the profession , these factors are preventable.

Our perspectives in life are the primary variable and the only difference in being successful or unsuccessful. There are a lot of things that one can do in the realm of the nursing profession. One has to look deeper and move further. For those that are on the brink of letting go of this noble profession , remember that passion is not something that we stumble upon, nor something that we discover.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Tuesday, October 26, About Work for Us! Contact Privacy Policy Disclaimer. Sign in. Forgot your password? Get help. My role as a nurse researcher and assistant professor at the University of South Florida is to evaluate the needs of the nursing workforce and design and implement programs to address them. One nurse on the front lines reported irreversible damage from the trauma of caring for extremely sick patients.

Others are experiencing shortages of oxygen, equipment and other needed supplies to keep themselves safe and to keep their patients alive. As more nurses leave the workforce, patient care will no doubt suffer.

Research has shown a relationship between nurse staffing ratios and patient safety. Increased workload and stress can put nurses in situations that are more likely to lead to medical errors. Lower nurse staffing and higher patient loads per nurse are associated with an increased risk for patients of dying in the hospital.

Because hospitals cannot open beds if there are no nurses to staff them, some hospitals are being forced to shut down emergency rooms and turn away patients in need of medical care. That is a problem for not only hospitals in large cities; rural hospitals are also struggling.

Alarmingly, some hospitals are considering the need to potentially ration medical care. The share of nurses who reported considering leaving their jobs due to burnout varied between states, with relatively low percentages doing so in California, Washington, and New York and relatively high percentages doing so in Utah and New Mexico.

Although the researchers examined data collected before America's coronavirus epidemic took hold, they acknowledged the "ever-growing stress associated with the … [epidemic] … could leave the [United States] with an unstable nurse workforce for years to come.

The researchers argued, however, that there are ways to address the factors associated with burnout. Nurses have been struggling to bear the weight of the Covid crisis for nearly a year now. But as this newly released data reveals, nurse burnout was already a challenge long before the pandemic began. In some ways, that's puzzling. Nearly every clinical leader I know is deeply focused on engagement and wellness of their teams. So why are so many nurses still burned out—and even leaving the profession?

In my team's pre-Covid research, we found a potential solution by going back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The hierarchy proposes that basic needs lie at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid. I think of these needs in the way humans need air, food, and water to live. These basic needs must be met before a person can fulfill their higher-level needs, such as self-actualization.

Our research revealed, even before the pandemic, most nurse leaders were focusing their efforts on the top of the pyramid, aiming to help nurses work creatively and achieve their full potential. It's an important goal, but if you overlook fundamental needs, you could be unintentionally missing what's driving nurses into burnout.

Additionally, states such as California took the opportunity to significantly change the parameters to meet the low-income Medicaid threshold, which added thousands of patients to the already full healthcare rosters. This translates to not just an increase in volume, but an influx of patients with co-morbidities such as obesity and diabetes. Nurses are constantly faced with the fear of being injured at work. In spite of education and no-lift campaigns in the work unit, many nurses admit to moving patients alone due to the perception of time constraints.

As a result of costly patient-handling injuries, many healthcare systems and hospitals have established punitive consequences for nurses who handle patients alone and risk injury. While this may deter the behavior of lone-wolf nursing, the threat of disciplinary action for providing patient care adds to the overall tension of the job. Nurses are expected to do more with fewer resources in an effort to find the sweet spot of the formula for productivity aligned with the actual number of nurses needed on a shift.

The expectations from leadership as well as patients and families boil down to tremendous stress for the nurse. Bedside nurses are working under staffing models that utilize a patient acuity system, such as GRASP , to calculate the needs and numbers of the patients in a unit to find the exact number of nurses to work for that shift.

However, due to the complexity of these tools, it is not uncommon for the acuity system's numbers to be out of alignment with the true staffing needs of the unit. Challenges such as the geography of units or nurses from the previous shift failing to accurately predict the care required for a patient can place the nurse in an assignment with an extreme workload, especially if the nurse has limited assistance.

Unfortunately, the phrase "nurses eat their young" is all too common in the profession. Nurses experience an almost rite-of-passage form of lateral violence in the workplace.