Where has the ancillary support for our healthcare facilities gone? Ancillary support includes the critical position of Certified Nursing Assistants, or CNAs. These positions are vital to our staffing models, partnering with Registered Nurses to take on certain ratios or acuity of patients. Nurses rely on CNAs to support their work efforts and to support quality patient care and customer service to the patient and their families.
Where did they go?
Healthcare personnel makes up one of the largest groups of skilled workers. During this time of COVID, CNAs who are innately caretakers may be taking care of their families. Or, they may be cautious in potentially exposing their significant others to COVID. And another consideration may be unemployment payments available to them could potentially be more than what they were making in a care facility, working intense and laborious hours. Now, with schools resuming across the country, many CNAs may need to be home supporting their child(ren) during this time.
What will the impact be on nursing?
Healthcare facilities across the U.S. are scrambling to recruit critical CNA personnel to their facilities. This is adding to the heavy burden placed on Registered Nurses in a COVID world. Now, they have to manage higher patient loads, higher acuity, and longer days without support staff. This inevitably will contribute to the already high burnout rate of the Registered Nurse.
What can we do?
Acuity is higher, ratios that were considered pre-COVID, should not be maintained now. Additionally, the patients and their families need more emotional support or discharge care, which the nurse needs to be afforded time to properly do. Considerations by healthcare organizations should include training new staff to become CNAs, flexible hours for CNAs to allow the ability to care for family or to work with child(ren) for schooling. Healthcare facilities should also consider paying the CNA a higher wage. Another consideration could be to partner with nursing schools and offer work to the students on a per diem type basis. Or a healthcare facility can staff up with additional Registered Nurses.
If we do not act, we will face an even greater shortage of nurses. Nurses will not stay in nursing and new nurses will not enter the workforce if we do not support our nurses. And all the strides that have been made in the last years will be reversed. Regardless of the support and recognition given to our frontline workers – “Heroes” will be for naught.
Further reading
https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Some-employers-desperate-to-hire-in-wake-of-COVID-19-569135211.html
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/20/881285807/why-some-cnas-are-staying-home-during-the-pandemic
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/21/880945464/nursing-homes-struggle-as-staff-choose-unemployment-checks-over-paychecks
At Conexus MedStaff our values and mission drive our days and the way we work, we do what we do for the talented international nurses and international nursing graduates we support, and the healthcare facilities we partner with in the U.S. to help solve the nursing shortage. Learn more about our vision here