Sources say some of the biggest reasons why nurses and other hospital staff are quitting their jobs is because of the COVID-19 pandemic are emotional and physical burnout, complicated vaccine mandates, and extensive workload due to disproportionate ratios.
Burnout
Nurses are on the front lines of the physical and emotional toll the pandemic has caused on society. For the past 18 months, these healthcare workers are the ones dealing with a revolving door of death, sickness, and pain, and they are expected to remain calm in the face of these tragedies to be able to successfully do their jobs.
“Some days coming home from the hospital I yell at God, I yell at myself, I yell at COVID and cry. And that’s all before I pull into my driveway,” Mary Lynn Briggs, an ICU nurse in Bakersfield, said. Of the dozens of COVID-19 patients she has treated since the pandemic began, only three have survived.
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Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, president of National Nurses United, says:
“We thought the pandemic would be over soon and could take time later to deal with our emotions,” said “Then the second surge hit, and the third and now it’s the fourth.”
The National Nurses United is the largest nursing union in the country, which has more than 100,000 members in its California association. And yet, this number of nurses in the workforce is dwindling by the minute, as nurses choose to leave their high-pressure jobs.
Matt Miele, a trauma nurse working in the Eureka Hospital in Humboldt County, says that four nurses have already left their posts at their hospital just in the last month and he himself is considering looking for a less pressuring position elsewhere.
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Vaccine mandates
California was one of the first states to impose vaccine mandates.
Contrary to popular belief, not all medical staff and nurses are pro-vaccination. However, a lot of hospitals and medical centers in the state are implementing vaccine mandates at their institutions, prompting nurses to quit their jobs.
Some nurses have even participated in anti-staff rallies in Southern California, arguing that the mandates “violate their personal freedom.”
Disproportionate worker-to-patient ratio
Some nurses look to the disproportionate worker-to-patient ratio as a cause for them quitting. Hospitals also note that even before the pandemic, shortage of staff was already a problem.
Matt Miele says, “To me, it seems like the lowest staffing levels that I’ve seen at the time we need it the most,” Currently, Miele frequently works at a patient-to-emergency-room-nurse ratio that exceeds the four-to-one required by the state.
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“Stress is part of the game when you sign up to be an emergency medicine RN, but this is another level.” Miele is worried because the staff is unable to routinely monitor the patients in the waiting rooms. His hospital is now taking early steps to consider rationing care based on who is most likely to survive among their hospitalized patients, but this isn’t confirmed yet.
The need for healthcare workers are at an all-time high, and with the record-breaking COVID-19 cases as well as hospitalizations due to California wildfires, it isn’t difficult to pinpoint why. Out of more than 52,000 temporary health care jobs posted every week, only about 3,000 are filled.
Apparently, to help with the resignations and understaffing, some California hospitals are paying more for their nurses. However, it is arguable if an increase in payment is what the nurses and medical staff need to continue working.
