The world experienced terrible pandemics with a shortage of medical professionals in 2019. Licensed nursing staff and clinical workers were forced to sacrifice their health to save people from infectious diseases. Before the pandemics, medicine in the US experienced nursing shortages due to low wages (Xu, 2020). It proves that government did not encourage nurses to improve their qualifications as long as COVID-19 did not take thousands of lives. The US’s nursing sphere experienced an even more dramatic decline during the pandemics because many employees suffered when they gave care to those infected with COVID-19. It happened because many centers lacked life-saving personal protection equipment to prevent the spread of infection among nurses (Xu, 2020). Additionally, the nurse who contracted the virus should have been quarantined for two weeks, which deteriorated the nursing shortage, making it a more critical problem.
Nurses were the ones who took care of all infected patients during pandemics because the governments closed many medical centers for visitors. As a result, the patient’s relatives could not help him to recover quickly, forcing a small number of nurses to treat a large number of patients (Xu, 2020). For example, Nebraska Center for Nursing was understaffed by 4,062 nurses, estimated to increase to 5,436 in five years (Nebraska Center for Nursing, 2020). These projections hint that even after the lesson that pandemics taught to medicine, nursing is not going to level up. Centers for Medicaid Services acknowledged the existing problem with the number of nurses giving a free pass to some workers (Xu, 2020). They removed some competency requirements for providing healthcare to infected patients, giving a chance to recruit more unlicensed nurses. Still, recruiting new skilled and licensed nurses is vital for preventing future illnesses and improving the whole country’s healthcare.
References
Nebraska Center for Nursing. (2020). COVID-19 pandemic accentuates nursing shortage during WHO’s designated “Year of the Nurse”. Nebraska Nurse, 53(3), 8. Web.
Xu, H., Intrator, O., & Bowblis, J. R. (2020). Shortages of staff in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic: What are the driving factors? Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, 21(10), 1371–1377. Web.