This is how many people, other nurses included, react to nurses walking off the job to strike. How dare we not strike? Hint: It’s about pay, but not ours. We’ve been enduring incredible stress well before COVID due to administrators steadily increasing nurse/ patient ratios for decades. The entire 27 years I’ve been an RN, I’ve heard “nursing shortage” and I couldn’t understand it because there were always more students vying for spots in a nursing program than existed. Turns out, hospitals were cutting staff to the bone to increase profits and crying wolf about a nurse shortage. It sounds better than “profit shortage” when referring to healthcare.

Now we really are having a nursing shortage because nurses have been abused so long few people are attracted to the profession. It’s hard work, we have licenses to maintain, and because the stakes are so high, terrifying when we don’t have the support of safe staffing levels. 33% of those who do enter the profession are leaving it within their first two years. Staffing levels are unsafe almost everywhere, hospitals, nursing homes, outpatient clinics, and there is no end in sight. New Hampshire is no exception. We have to look hard at insurance reimbursement for care, and the salaries and costs of both health insurance companies’ and hospitals’ C-suite. There’s some hemorrhaging there and that’s where we need to apply a tourniquet.

Beth Benham

Nottingham

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