Here is a number to sit with: it now takes the average hospital seventy-eight days to hire one experienced registered nurse. Two and a half months, for one hire. And in the same year, the average hospital lost $5.19 million to nurse turnover. Those figures come from the 2026 edition of the NSI Natio...
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Two sets of numbers came out this spring, and they only make sense read together. The first is unambiguously good news. Applications to nursing school are surging. Entry-level bachelor's enrollment rose 7.6%, to 283,303 students. After years of anxious talk about whether anyone still wants this job,...
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Here is a question worth sitting with. If two hospitals in your area quietly agreed not to recruit each other's nurses, how would you ever find out? You would not, mostly. You would just notice that the offers were never quite as good as you expected, that the recruiter from across town never called...
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On 2 February the federal government formally repealed the minimum staffing rule for nursing homes. It is worth being precise about what that means, because the rule had already been struck down in court and then blocked by Congress. This was the paperwork on a death that happened some time ago. For...
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For the first time since the pandemic, most of the numbers in nursing's annual scoreboard are moving in the right direction. Turnover fell for the third year running. Hospitals added nearly a hundred thousand nurses to their payrolls. Even the time it takes to fill a vacancy shrank, by three whole d...
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It seems counterintuitive, and it’s really not how things should work: when a health emergency erupted in the United States, health workers started being furloughed and laid off en masse. How could that happen, and what can we expect next? “All hands on deck,” they said. But weeks later, nurses star...
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When we watch the news, when we see stories of people whose health and lives are in danger, when we read accounts of human suffering, does being a nurse make a difference? Do we bear a special responsibility? A responsibility to “nurse out loud,” to take a stand and speak out? More and more nurses a...
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Up in Illinois, a Registered Nurse is making a splash in the midterm election campaign: 31-year-old challenger Lauren Underwood has a surprise 6-point polling lead in the state’s 14th Congressional district and “is now better known and better liked than the incumbent”. Nobody knows how the election...
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Have you voted already? Are you planning to vote? On this blog we’re not in the habit of telling you what to do. You’re smart, you know what is right for you – and we know you’re already dealing with enough people who feel they know what you ought to do. We tend to just provide some practical inform...
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Donald Trump is not running. Neither is Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But even if your heart might not skip a happy or fearful beat when you think of Kevin McCarthy or Steny Hoyer, the upcoming midterm elections are going to be as important as any you can think of! What’s important for the countr...
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A perfect storm is coming for nurses. Just when the number of senior citizens who need complex medical care is set to rise sharply, no fewer than one million nurses are leaving the profession. The reason for both things is the same: the baby boomer generation. Many nurses now approaching retirement...
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This year, as healthcare has become increasingly political, the ACA enrollment period for 2018 has been cut in half and the budget to promote it has been cut by 90%. As healthcare workers on the front lines, making sure patients have access to healthcare is critical so please spread the word and inf...
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