At present, the new coronavirus pandemic continues to raging in the United States, and many areas are in short supply of nurses, especially rural areas and smaller medical institutions.
The Associated Press reported on the 2nd that some hospitals provide temporary training for nurses with inadequate professional experience, or cut some clinic services to ensure that there are enough manpower for critically ill patients. There are also hospitals recruiting nurses from other places.
Kevin Fitzpatrick, a nurse in the emergency room of the Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan, said that some experienced nurses were “overwhelmed” by the pandemic and chose to resign and move to a relatively easy job. “It’s not easy to find someone to replace them.”
Fitzpatrick said that his emergency room nurses are about 5 fewer than usual when they are at their fullest, and each person usually needs to take care of 4 coronavirus pandemic patients.
Karen Tanglan, a professor at the School of Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, said that so far, there are limited data to study how the new coronavirus pandemic affects the nurse population in the United States, but some hospitals have previously had the hidden danger of understaffing, and the outbreak has worsened the problem.
Aspellos Healthcare Group, which operates 9 hospitals in Wisconsin and Michigan, recruited nurses with more than one year of experience and promised to give each person a signing bonus of $15,000.
Group senior vice president and head nurse Ruth Risley-Gray said that manpower is being deployed between different departments, but external support is still needed.
Since August, some nurses under the group have fallen ill one after another. In mid-October, 215 employees were quarantined due to symptoms or contact with confirmed cases, and only some returned to work.
Apple Hansen, executive vice president of the Aya Health Care Center in San Diego, California, said that with the surge in cases across the United States, hospitals across the country are scrambling for nurse resources, offering weekly salaries ranging from $1,500 to more than $5,000.
Nurse Robert Gardner was hired to serve in a small town hospital near Atlanta, Georgia. He participated in the rescue after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, saying that the current pandemic situation is “much worse”, and he is more worried that the arrival of the flu season will increase the burden on hospitals.
At present, the cumulative number of coronavirus pandemic cases in the United States has exceeded 9 million, and the number of daily increasing cases in 47 states in the United States is on the rise.
