Global Nursing Shortage
The shortage of nursing professionals in the US has gotten a lot of press in the last couple years. There are even programs I’ve heard of where you attending nursing school on certain government (state government, I believe) loans and after you graduate and are practicing for a certain number of years, the loans are forgiven. The “crisis” here is usually linked to the aging “Baby Boomer” segment of the population. The situation is such that I know a few people who have entered this career field as a sort of second choice, that is, it’s not what they studied in their 18-21 college years. This includes my sister-in-law, who finished her Masters in Nursing last spring and began working this summer in Labor and Delivery at Inova Fairfax Hospital. She already had some graduate work in Business, spent a few years working in management, then spent several years with the job title “Mother”, then finished challenging coursework in Nursing ending up at the head of her class and securing a (in my opinion) prestigious fellowship as a Lactation Consultant.
So let’s cross my second-hand experience with the US nursing issue with my second-hand experience with hospital care in Malawi. This example is brought to us by Joanne Jorissen, a US citizen working as a Nurse Midwife in Lilongwe, Malawi, who writes at BabyCatcher
This morning I went to the hospital to check on the woman who had the surgery and found her resting in the postnatal ward. The postnatal nurse was passing out medications and told me that the patient was all right but that her vital signs had not yet been taken today. I quickly looked over her chart and noted that Lwanja wrote, “check vital signs regularly” but couldn’t find even a single set of vital signs since the time of her surgery yesterday. Considering that there is one postnatal nurse for close to a hundred patients, this comes as no surprise. As I was standing near her bed, the nursing matron (i.e. the charge nurse of the hospital) came and told me that someone tested the autoclave machine (the machine that sterilizes all the instruments used in surgery for both Bottom and Kamuzu Central Hospital) and found that it was actually not successfully sterilizing anything. At this point there is only one autoclave so it cannot be put out of commission until fixed.
There are quite a few details on Joanne’s site that highlight the differences between hospital care in Malawi and the US and just what “shortage” means. He’s a statistic from my experience: when my second child was born, our postnatal nurse was covering four patients, two mothers and two babies. Joanne routinely mentions shortages she works with, both in coworkers and equipment.
So, if you are yourself in a nursing program, and have been motivated by the need to fill shortages, I hope you can see that there are shortages and there are shortages. Joanne has said, “individual efforts really can and do make a difference.”
Let your vision be world-embracing, rather than confined to your own self.
- Baha’u'llah
In Charlottesville, Virginia (US):
Jeff Lavezzo