Are Hospitals to Blame for Pandemic Nursing Shortage? It’s Complicated

September 3, 2021

(Medscape) – National Nurses United (NNU), a California-based union with 175,000 members, is blaming hospitals for nursing shortages that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a news release issued last Thursday, NNU said that chronic understaffing by hospitals has driven away many nurses who are not “willing to risk their licenses or the safety of their patients by working under unsafe conditions in hospitals.” The union claims there is no nursing shortage in the US as a whole, citing a 2017 report from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that found there will be enough RNs to meet the nation’s health needs through 2030. NNU does, however, admit that nurses are inequitably distributed across the country and that there are shortages in some areas. (Read Full Article)