Nursing Crisis: NY Legislator Suggests Solutions

Amid the doomsday scenarios for future of nursing, it’s refreshing to find a bright spot.

The Health Blog learned that Clinique, a division of cosmetics giant Estee Lauder, established the Clinique Nursing Scholarship Program that year to boost folks to become RNs. Next week, the company will honor five nursing students and scholarship recipients at a luncheon in New York. The keynote speaker is New York State Assemblywoman and RN Aileen Gunther (pictured), who is supporting the creation of a federal Office of the National Nurse to raise awareness approximately health issues and to keep nurses in the health care dialogue.

The Health Blog spoke to Gunther, a Bronx local, with 29 years’ experience in health care, working in everything from obstetrics and emergency room care to infection control. She’s an advocate for RNs, particularly in New York, which has roughly 239,000 nurses, though nearly 70,000 no longer work in the field. The number of nurses on the sidelines is “because of the working conditions,” Gunther told us. “Do you think those public would leave whether they had better working conditions? We as a government have to look and listen to

This year, the New York Assembly passed a bill, which is now in the state Senate, that would ban mandatory overtime for nurses. Eleven other states have such laws, Gunther said. When she was a nurse, she was often forced to work back-to-back eight-hour shifts, she tells the Health Blog. Such double-time demands are the kinds of things that drive folks, particularly those with families, out of the profession, she said. “I loved being a nurse, and I loved the citizens I worked with,” Gunther said. “But as far as quality of life, it’s very, very difficult.”

Gunther thinks the state should additionally supply supplemental funds to nursing school teaching salaries, too. She said there are waiting lists at the nursing schools in her district considering there aren’t sufficient teachers. For nurses to go into teaching, “they’d take a $20,000 decrease in pay,” she said. “Why not invest in opening up increasingly classrooms? Nurses are the spine of health care.”

Original post by Heather Won Tesoriero