Nurses are quitting at an alarming rate

UConn Newswrit­ing Course

March 21, 2024

By: Kwasi Osei-Amankwah

STORRS — There will be a nurs­ing cri­sis in the Unit­ed States by the year 2027, stud­ies say.

This is because nurs­es have been leav­ing their jobs in droves due to burnout, exhaus­tion, and oth­er fac­tors. Since the offi­cial shut­down in March 2020, pro­jec­tions show that the num­ber of nurs­es who have quit will only increase in the next four years. The gov­ern­ment is now inves­ti­gat­ing the impact of the pan­dem­ic on nurs­es’ men­tal health and the fac­tors con­tribut­ing to this cri­sis.

The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has hit the health­care indus­try hard, and nurs­es have borne the cri­sis. Four years lat­er, as the world is still try­ing to come to terms with the after­math of the pan­dem­ic, it’s becom­ing clear that nurs­es’ men­tal health has tak­en a hit.

Around 100,000 nurs­es have left their jobs dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, lead­ing to a short­age of health­care pro­fes­sion­als and increased pres­sure on those who remained. Over 60% of the sam­ple report­ed an increased work­load dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, and more than half of the nurs­es report­ed feel­ing emo­tion­al­ly drained, fatigued, burned out, or at the end of their rope a few times a week or every day.

Eileen L. Ken­ny, Reg­is­tered Nurse and Nurse Coor­di­na­tor at Stu­dent Health and Well­ness at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut, who was work­ing at the school at the time, echoed these sta­tis­tics. “The stress lev­el of peo­ple work­ing in hos­pi­tal set­tings was even worse (than you could imag­ine) because they tru­ly did­n’t know what they were deal­ing with and could get peo­ple that they cared about sick.”

Renée M. Con­stant, Reg­is­tered Nurse and Nurse Coor­di­na­tor at Stu­dent Health and Well­ness at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut, who worked at a hos­pi­tal dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, had thoughts sim­i­lar to Ken­ny’s. “Every nurse has their own expe­ri­ence, but I felt I was the go-to in a health care set­ting. Then I went home, and I’m the go-to for my friends and fam­i­ly who know I’m a nurse. It’s almost like you could­n’t escape it. It was all day, every day.”

Experts have warned of nurs­ing short­ages in the U.S. for decades due to an aging work­force and issues such as burnout and stress caused by high patient-to-nurse ratios, low pay, and work­place safe­ty con­cerns. This has led to many walk­outs, strikes, and oth­er protests.

The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has accel­er­at­ed these issues, lead­ing to unprece­dent­ed burnout among nurs­es. This report uses data to iden­ti­fy poten­tial indi­ca­tors of stress and burnout among the cur­rent nurs­ing work­force, which can help pol­i­cy­mak­ers devel­op tar­get­ed solu­tions and allo­cate resources effec­tive­ly.

Accord­ing to the Nation­al Library of Med­i­cine, the psy­cho­log­i­cal term for burnout can be defined as a ” psy­cho­log­i­cal syn­drome emerg­ing as a pro­longed response to chron­ic inter­per­son­al stres­sors on the job. The three key dimen­sions of this response are an over­whelm­ing exhaus­tion, cyn­i­cism, detach­ment from the job, and a sense of inef­fec­tive­ness and lack of accom­plish­ment.” And while it is easy for most to think back to the pan­dem­ic and remem­ber that it would nev­er end, that feel­ing was dou­bled for front-line work­ers.

Con­stant and Ken­ny shared that this made sense to them as they’ve wit­nessed peo­ple leave their jobs or retire ear­ly due to the pan­dem­ic. “I know from what my daugh­ter had said, who had been a nurse for a cou­ple years (at the time), she saw many new nurs­es come in and said to me, ‘I don’t think that they’re gonna stay for very long.” Ken­ny said, “To be brand new, even try­ing to learn stuff and not being taught nor­mal things because every­thing you have to learn now is COVID-19.”

Con­stant talked about the peo­ple on the old­er side, say­ing, “I think you have the oth­er extreme too where old­er nurs­es in hos­pi­tal set­tings that have been there for a long time have basi­cal­ly said ‘I can’t do this any­more, maybe I was gonna work a few more years, but this is what’s gonna push me out the door.’ ”

The sit­u­a­tion is expect­ed to wors­en in the com­ing years. By 2027, almost one-fifth of the nurs­ing work­force, near­ly 900,000 reg­is­tered nurs­es, plan to leave their jobs due to stress, burnout, or retire­ment. This mass exo­dus pos­es a sig­nif­i­cant threat to the nation­al health­care sys­tem, cre­at­ing an urgent need for imme­di­ate solu­tions. The main ques­tion is, how do we keep nurs­es at their jobs and encour­age them to push through any poten­tial issues?

Accord­ing to Ken­ny, “What (hos­pi­tals) are doing more now than they used to is giv­ing sup­port to new­er nurs­es; they have some pro­grams where nurs­es get a peri­od like ori­en­ta­tion and give them time to talk and debrief, which is prob­a­bly not enough. But rather than just assum­ing, ‘Oh, nurs­ing is stress­ful, so you’re going to be stressed,’ instead say­ing, ‘Okay, this par­tic­u­lar time is more stress­ful than usu­al.”

For Con­stant, the one thing that got her through COVID-19 was “the col­lab­o­ra­tion with our peers, talk­ing, and being with one anoth­er. I feel that (UConn) is very dif­fer­ent from a hos­pi­tal set­ting. We’re an excel­lent group, and we worked well togeth­er (at the time). Where­as in a hos­pi­tal set­ting, I don’t know if you have that. You need more men­tor­ship; you need some­body to talk to, to grieve with.”

In August 2023, the Biden and Har­ris admin­is­tra­tion passed a $100 mil­lion bill to train more nurs­es and grow the nurs­ing work­force. Accord­ing to the U.S. Depart­ment of Health, These invest­ments will “address the increas­ing demand for reg­is­tered nurs­es, nurse prac­ti­tion­ers, cer­ti­fied nurse mid­wives, and nurse fac­ul­ty.”

For Ken­ny, more needs to be done: “We need more lead­er­ship (in hos­pi­tals). We need some­thing like, ‘Oh, it’s been tough the last few weeks. Can we give you piz­za or an extra half hour so you guys can meet and vent or some­thing?’ You just don’t want to go home and vent about it and bring it to your fam­i­ly; every­one is stressed.”

“Exact­ly; just because we’re nurs­es and we see these things often does­n’t mean we’re super­hu­man,” Con­stant said