Nursing shortage pinching Utah

If in coming years you find yourself headed for the hospital, you might want to consider taking along a nurse to care for you.

The nursing shortage is already severe. National estimates say the United States will be 434,000 nurses short before 2020. And the pinch in Utah is among the worst.

Utah's population is high in the very young and very old — the two populations most likely to require medical services and, thus, skilled nurses.

The Utah Nurses Association this year cited a shortage of 2,000 nurses, with numbers climbing. Utah's is the third-most severe shortage in the country, with 592 nurses per 100,000 people, said Mindy deHoll, president of Advanced Nursing Service, which provides temporary nurses to fill critical gaps at local hospitals.

Debbie Mason, a registered nurse for more than 20 years, has watched her profession change, not always for the better. She knows firsthand that hospitalized patients require more care than they used to. Because of pressure to cut costs, only the very ill remain hospitalized; the rest are sent home as soon as possible — or never admitted.

"I have had a number of nurses in administrative roles harp about how when they were a nurse on the floor, they were in charge of 30-plus patients. What I tell them is that it has changed! The patients in their day that were the regular floor patients are outpatients now. Their ICU patients are our regular patients. Our ICU patients were dead in their day."

"The nursing shortage definitely shows up in the hospital," said Kim Wirthlin, vice president of health care at the University of Utah. "On a daily basis, hospitals throughout the state have nurse vacancies. To ensure that patient care is not compromised, hospitals fill those vacancies by paying overtime and using agency and traveling nurses. All very expensive solutions.

"If hospitals can't get the nurses they need, they close beds. Closing beds has an impact on patient access," she said.

The nursing crisis has come forcibly to the attention of the State Board of Regents, which oversees the state institutions where most nurse training takes place. The regents are promoting a $2 million special request to the Legislature to help increase the flow of new nurses, though it likely faces an uphill battle, with state revenues themselves in a critical state of health.