RICHLAND, Wash. –
There’s a healthcare crisis going on around the country, a shortage of nurses.
This problem was happening before the pandemic.
No matter where the hospital is, one thing is for sure nursing positions aren’t being filled.
Ethel Pham is an Emergency Room Technician at Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland and a union representative.
Pham has 40 years of experience as a healthcare worker and says one of the problems the hospital is facing is financial compensation towards the caregivers.
“We are not at the point where we’re not competitive in salary,” said Pham.
Pham asks why would you take a job at a hospital in housekeeping making minimum wage when you can go to a place like Starbucks and make more than minimum wage.
She says she and other workers get sent out a massive text from Kadlec asking if someone would be willing to pick up another shift.
According to Pham, when she started working at a hospital working in healthcare, it was the most stable job and paid the most.
The strain on the profession is at an all-time high right now as workers are feeling overworked.
“Our retention strategies, everything that we’ve focused on to try to get our staff to where we know we want to be and to meet the demands of the community,” said Kadlec Chief Human Resource officer Toby Sutton.
Sutton says the hospital is doing its best to try to improve every day by focusing on the retention of employees, hiring traveling nurses to fill holes, and recruiting.
Sutton says another problem is the lack of nursing educators in nursing schools.
Nurses are at a premium, some are approaching retirement age, which will just cause more holes to fill.
“They turn away a lot of applicants every single year that are viable candidates. People who want to be a nurse but the capacity for their education systems just can’t meet that'” said Sutton.
Kadlec makes calls to different nursing schools such as Columbia Basin College and WSU Tri-Cities to recruit.
Both schools do their clinicals at Kadlec, Trios, and Lourdes, so they already have an idea of who the students are.
Kim Tucker is the Director of the nursing programs at CBC.
Tucker says they accept a total of 126 students to the different nursing programs every year, the catch?
There are only 15 faculty members for the programs.
“We haven’t been able to grow the program beyond 50 in the R.N. program a year because of lack of faculty,” said Tucker.
The reason for the lack of instructors according to Tucker is the pay gap between a practicing nurse and a nurse educator.
Some of the nurse educators work per diem shifts at hospitals and clinics around the area.
Pham just wants to know why workers are leaving.
“Why are we losing workers? Why are they not staying? Our situation needs to be addressed before we lose some more workers,” said Pham.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing estimates more than a million nurses need to enter the workforce in the next few years to avoid a critical nursing crisis.
Tucker says that they added an L.P.N. to the B.S.N. program last year which provided them with the opportunity to hire faculty.
This new faculty works with nursing students on the weekends to complete their clinical so they don’t have to miss work during the week.
Tucker says this new program will help grow the nursing program as well as be able to admit more students.
