Chelsea Buck quit her job as a nurse at Allen County Regional Hospital in 2015 to explore the vast opportunities in the nursing field, working on an ?as needed? basis at other hospitals in the area.
?I was still a new nurse and wanted to see what else was out there,? she said.
But there?s no place like home, Buck soon discovered. In 2017, she returned to ACRH after the birth of her daughter. Buck is married to Travis Buck, a deputy with the Allen County sheriff?s department.
Buck found her schedule of working three days a week more conducive to her new responsibilities as a parent. Mostly, though, she returned because of the relationships she had developed with her boss and co-workers.
?The teamwork here is not the same as anywhere else,? she said.
Fostering those types of relationships is one of the key ways ACRH?s leaders look for creative ways to retain staff in an era of nursing shortages throughout the nation, Chief Nursing Officer Patty McGuffin said.
?The opportunities with a nursing degree are endless. There are jobs with electronic medical records, sales jobs, office jobs, hospital positions. It isn?t about just one type of nursing,? McGuffin said. ?But the bottom line is we have a nursing shortage. Hospitals have difficulty recruiting and retaining nurses.?
By 2020, the U.S. nursing supply is expected to fall 36 percent below requirements with a shortage of more than a million registered nurses nationwide, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration. Kansas is expected to have a shortage of about 5,900 by then.
ACRH currently has eight full-time RN vacancies, and three PRN vacancies. Four nurses recently left for higher-salary, stay-at-home case management jobs with Aetna.
Earlier this month, four patients were transferred to other hospitals because of a lack of nurses on staff. Some of that was related to illness, McGuffin said, either because a nurse was sick or had to stay home with a sick child. Some of it could have been attributed to scheduling; managers follow specific staffing protocols based on expected numbers of patients and it?s difficult to quickly adjust for unexpected demand.
The recent vacancies make it even more challenging to bring in extra staff during those times and the hospital has a limited pool of PRNs and others who are available on short notice, she said.
AT THE heart of the nursing shortage is an aging population, including an aging nursing workforce, aging nursing instructors and an increase in older patients who require more complex care, according to the National League for Nursing. More than 40 percent of the registered nursing workforce is over age 50.
There?s no shortage of those who want to become nurses, though, McGuffin said. Competition for slots in nursing schools is competitive and schools are developing their own strategies to meet demand. The University of Kansas School of Nursing, for example, teamed with seven community colleges to allow students to earn their associates degree while working toward a bachelor of science degree in nursing.
Online nursing programs also have grown in popularity ? and acceptance. More and more, McGuffin receives resumes from those who received online education. Twenty years ago, she might have viewed that as a negative. Now, she understands the benefits.
?We?re just busier people. We know people are using that as an option to fit their work-life balance,? she said. ?A lot of the online education is at the bachelor?s and master?s level, so they?ve already had some clinicals for the associates degree program.?
