Opinion

AN RX FOR NYC’S NURSING SHORTAGE

IT’S a patient’s worst nightmare. You’re lying in a hospital bed, and something goes wrong. You press the call button frantically to summon help, but no one answers.

For years, New York City has faced a dramatic shortage of nurses. And unless we do something about it, we risk having that nightmare become reality for a patient at any time.

To ensure the highest-quality care, many hospitals aim for nurse-to-patient ratios of one to five. But we hear stories of ratios in city hospitals climbing as high as one nurse for every 10 patients, or worse. Also, hospitals often can’t find a replacement if a nurse has to call in sick. Instead, that nurse’s patients end up getting split among the other nurses on duty, stretching resources even thinner.

The result is that nurses spend more of their time dealing with emergencies and have less time for critical assessments and general patient care. Worst of all, some of our most experienced nurses are leaving our hospitals, frustrated by their inability to provide the best possible care.

And the problem is likely to get worse. The average age of New York City’s nurses has gone up substantially in recent years. As a result, we’ll get squeezed on both ends — baby boomers reaching retirement age will need more health services, just as we’re losing many of our current nurses.

Now, you might assume our nurse shortage results from a lack of interested nursing students. The reality is the opposite. The truth is we can’t keep up with the number of New Yorkers who want to become nurses.

Last year, for example, the City University of New York had to turn away 575 qualified applicants from its nursing programs, simply because the university didn’t have enough nursing professors to teach them. Sounds crazy, but it’s true. A city that desperately needs more nurses — and desperately needs to create jobs — has been turning away smart, hardworking New Yorkers who want to fill our nursing gap.

In response, the City Council came up with a common-sense solution. We created a partnership between CUNY and New York City hospitals to add to the faculty at city nursing programs. CUNY worked with hospitals to identify 10 experienced nurses who’ll become guest faculty for a year. The program will allow nurses to make a short-term commitment to teaching without losing their current benefits. It’s not rocket science, simply a matter of sharing resources between city institutions.

These 10 more faculty members will allow CUNY to train 500 new nurses over the next five years. That’s 500 nurses who’ll help us provide quality health-care services to even more New Yorkers. And that’s 500 quality jobs we’ll be creating, even amid a recession.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the first class of students enrolled at Hunter College’s accelerated nursing program as they made their rounds at Bellevue Hospital. Some of these students are fulfilling a lifelong dream of becoming a nurse; others are seizing an opportunity to make a smart career change. Each of them is well on the way to a respected, secure career helping care for their fellow New Yorkers.

Nurses are present at life’s most critical moments. When you’re in the hospital and push that call button, you want to be sure there’s someone around to answer it. Through this initiative, we’ll help make sure more patients have access to a nurse when they need one the most.

Christine C. Quinn is speaker of the New York City Council.