West Virginia - April 2021

Page 6 West Virginia Nurse April, May, June 2021
2021 West Virginia
Nurse Deadlines
WV Nurse is a quarterly newspaper.
The due dates for the rest of 2021 are: .
• July 2021 issue: material due to WV Nurse
by May 24, 2021
• October 2021 issue: material due to WV Nurse
by August 23, 2021
For submission information, see p. 2 of this issue, or
the info on WVNA’s website, West Virginia Nurse Copy
Submission Guidelines. (“Copy” is journalism jargon for
written material; did you already know that?)
February 23, 2021
Re: Health Care Workforce Study Results
A Letter to the
West Virginia Legislature
Dear Member of the West Virginia Legislature:
During the 2020 Legislative Session HB 4434 was passed, requesting the Department of Commerce study the current and
projected status of the health care workforce in WV. The study looks at various health care disciplines across the spectrum of
care and the growth expected in the top 10 jobs in the health care industry over the next decade.
According to the study, nursing is the largest health care profession in WV at 19.5%. Also, according to the survey there is a
surplus nearly 500 registered nurses (RNs) in the state and a small shortage of advance practice registered nurses (APRNs),
including nurse practitioners (NPs) and certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs). What the study was unable to analyze
was nurse attrition and retention rates. While these were requested by the legislature in HB 4434, the response rates from
nurse employers for this data did not permit an adequate sample size to assure statistical reliability.
Like most service professions, nursing is a calling as well as a job. Becoming a registered nurse takes a year of pre-nursing
courses including chemistry and biology before starting the two years to complete an Associate of Science in Nursing or the 4
years to complete a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Only with a calling to tend to the sick would someone take on the task of
nursing school, yet many quit within a few months to a few years after entering practice.
The basic reason of providing care to the sick has not much changed since the time of Florence Nightingale; however, the
environment in which nurses provide care has greatly changed.
Patients are sicker, but lengths of stay are compressed; electronic charting, while having many benefits, has added a
substantial amount of work to what used to be notes on flowsheets and paper, and the ever-expanding regulatory and payer
compliance requirements often fall to the nursing staff to implement, chart, or collect. Yet at the bedside, the number of
nurses tending to these increased demands has remained the same or decreased.
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May 20, 2021
Fee: $99 Before April 30th: $85
Register at www.Hospiceofsouthernwv.org
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KEYNOTE SPEAKER
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Chief Medical Officer at
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There is also the emotional strain. The pandemic has shown the lengths to which nurses will go to take care of their patients
and the families of the patients. They work long hours and extra shifts. They worry about contracting COVID themselves or
worse, taking it home to their own families. They stay with the dying patients when family members cannot help their loved
ones cross over. Seeing so much suffering and death while being fatigued has taken an emotional toll on the nurses of WV.
Working conditions are challenging. The WVNA is hearing stories daily of nurses who were furloughed at the beginning of
the pandemic and had to take personal paid time off (PTO). Now they are needing to take time off because of quarantine
or because they themselves have the virus and are unable to work. They are out of PTO and are being denied worker’s
compensation. Nurses are being asked to reuse PPE and as stated before, work extra shifts and longer hours.
During the last surge of COVID-19, the shortage that was the most problematic was the shortage of nurses to care for the
patients. Many hospitals were using contract/traveling nurses, which was costing the hospitals more money and pulling
nurses from area of need to another area of need, leaving the first area with a shortage of nurses.
Nurses do not want to leave a profession that they are called to and love. According to the study, the health care job market
remains strong. And nurses continue to be in demand, yet nursing turnover remains a problem. Hospital administrators
have a challenge of retaining experienced nurses.
According to the AACN Nursing Fact Sheet April 2019, nursing is the nation’s largest health care profession, with more than 3.8
million nurses. Of all the licensed RNs in the U.S., 84.5% are employed in nursing, while 15.5 % are not working.
The 2020 NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report shows that in 2019, the RN turnover rate was 15.9%. Since
2015, the average hospital in the U.S. has turned over more than 80% of their RN staff. Nationally, over 20% of new nurses leave
within their first year and more than 25% of RN turnover is nurses with tenure of 1 year or less. The report also shows that
the average cost of turnover for a bedside RN is $36,000 - $56,000 resulting in the average hospital losing $3.6 million to $6.1
million per year.
Much effort has been made in WV on expanding nurse recruitment and nursing education to create a pipeline into the
profession. That is a laudable goal, but without shifting some energy toward examining retention, the cycle will not change.
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To the WV House of Delegates, the WV Senate, and the WV Bureau of Business and Economic Research, please do not let this
report be the end of your study: Please continue the study by looking into what causes job dissatisfaction and nursing turnover.
• Insufficient staffing
• Long shifts, extra shifts, and mandatory overtime
• Being pulled to an unfamiliar area to work
• Emotional stress
(Just to name a few.)
Please study strategies to retain nurses:
• Shared governance
• Adequate staffing
• The need for nurses to have work/life balance
• Proper orientation
• Safe working environment and transparency of patient acuity and the number of nurses working
• Nurse-led patient assignment committees
(Again, just to name a few.)
Thank you for doing the study. It was thorough for the topics that were studied and well thought out. I agree that
there is a surplus of nurses in WV. I believe that there are more than 500. The problem is they are not working, at
least not in the nursing profession. If things do not change, more will leave. The WVNA stands wanting to assist in the
study of attrition and retention of nurses in WV.
Warm Regards,
Joyce Wilson, APRN, FNP-C, WVNA President