KERA's Sam Baker talked about this with W. Stephen Love, President and CEO of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
Handling The Shortage
We're trying to makeshift and bring in people; closing areas that are doing procedures you can postpone and bring those nursing people in.
But you still have to match the skill set. Someone who's been working in an outpatient surgery arena may not be trained to handle a COVID patient.
Pay And Competition
Some of these traveling nurse firms are paying high rates. What we’ve had to deal with has almost been like price gouging.
Some people are leaving hospitals throughout the nation to join these traveling nurses because they get paid so much more.
That's why we're trying to ensure that the traveling nurses given to North Texas and Texas are coming from out of state. We don’t want to steal from Houston. And we don't want El Paso stealing from us.
Can Hospitals Afford To Pay What Nurses Are Asking?
Sometimes they have to, because of the COVID-19, but they can't do it long-term.
You get outside of Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton counties and you’re getting into some rural areas that have excellent community hospitals. But these exorbitant prices are really problematic on their (profit) margins. They're already stretched thin as it is.
Could The Nursing Shortage Affect Patient Care?
You look at staffing ratios and how much staff do you have per patient, and we're going to do everything we can that we don't sacrifice patient care in any way.
And that's why we're saying we're almost at capacity, even though we may be at 96% of the beds. If we don't have the staff, we're not going to put this into a patient safety situation.
COVID’s Impact On Nurses
We've had some longtime nurses that have just said, “You know, I'm gonna change professions. I'm gonna retire.”
You have to look at the traumatic experience they've been through for 18 months. They've dealt with people where they had to wear PPE.
They had a lot of patients die from COVID. They had to console family, people — many times virtually — on the death of a loved one. That takes a toll and it wears on people and they just get totally fatigued and tired.
They also get frustrated when they hear people say, “Well, I'm not going to wear a mask and I'm not going to get a vaccine,” because most of the people we're treating right now in our hospitals have not been vaccinated. It could have been so easily prevented.
So How Do You Keep The Nursing Staff Engaged?
Our clinical team management and our human resource people do an excellent job of trying to give them time away from the COVID unit, as much as they can.
They certainly try to work with them from how do we keep your spirits up? What can we do to improve the overall clinical morale of having to deal with so many sick patients?
They try a little bit of everything because they want to keep the staff as upbeat as possible. And you want to keep staff healthy.
RESOURCES:
Texas hospitals hit by staffing crisis as burnout depletes workforce and COVID-19 surges
The Texas Nursing Shortage: Condition Critical. More Graduates Needed to Close the Gap
Parkland exec: With nursing shortage, doctors may soon have to work more closely with nurses
