 | By Lucy King Senior Video Journalist, Opinion |
A year ago, I couldn't get the images of Covid patients spending weeks alone in hospital beds, slowly losing their breath, out of my mind. I imagined my mom or dad alone in the hospital, slipping away without me there to comfort them. |
Our team thought that if we could capture that moment in video — that unique, devastating moment of loss — perhaps people would take Covid more seriously. |
Two weeks later, my colleague Alex Stockton was at the bedside of Ana Maria Aragon, whose family was facing that reality. The resulting video triggered thousands of responses from viewers — especially from nurses. |
They were grateful to us for representing their pandemic experiences. Not only were they nurses, but the dire situations forced them into taking on the role of surrogate family members too. They were witnessing death at a previously unimaginable pace. Many nurses were unable to process what they were seeing at the time, guaranteeing that the psychological after effects would have a long tail. |
So when in September 2021 the American Nurses Association wrote to the White House declaring a "crisis-level human resource shortage of nurses," I thought that I understood why that was happening: Burned-out nurses were finally succumbing to a two-year long personal assault. |
I reached out to 55 nurses who wanted to leave their jobs, and their honesty was enlightening. It turns out I was wrong. In this video that I made with my colleague Jonah Kessel, five of the nurses I spoke with explain why the nursing shortage goes far beyond their own burnout. The lack of nurses by the bedside is not a pandemic-specific problem. It is not a problem triggered by nurses who just can't hack it. |
It's a bleed that began many years ago. The root cause? Hospital greed. It is the result of decades of mismanagement in a money-driven hospital system that prioritizes profit over patient safety. Far from a shortage, there's never been more licensed nurses in America — they're just not being hired. |
Two years into the pandemic, the compounding effects of Covid and an already broken system are clear: Many nurses are leaving their jobs, and the ones sticking around need more help. And more nurses would be good for all of us: An expansion of a nurse's workload by just one patient increases the likelihood of a patient dying within their first month of admission by 7 percent. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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