Is there a nursing shortage in the United States? Depends on who you ask Brittany Trang By Brittany Trang Oct. 16, 2023

https://www.statnews.com/2023/10/16/nursing-shortage-us-hospitals-unions/?utm_campaign=morning_rounds&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=278404014&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9vKAT0Gk1i7aLUmAsGGzTwXYPmcQRBKy9ra9ATT0Pf2b_IhH_qNrTyQKc0WwgiendcUdDu5tr9itMLwMSNMQqSlF-FRw&utm_content=278404014&utm_source=hs_email Hospitals have been bemoaning the nursing shortage even as we’ve come out of the pandemic, insistent that because they’ve had to hire so many travel nurses, there must be a shortage of nurses. On the other hand, nurses say that there are plenty of nurses — they just don’t want to work in an understaffed work environment where they don’t have time to do everything, much less do it well. So who’s right? Linda Aiken, the founding director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the problem is a shortage of nursing care.“These two things can exist at one time,” she said. “You can have a lot of nurses, but really at the intersection of care that’s delivered to the public, you could have a shortage because those institutions are not hiring enough of them.” Read more from my colleague Brittany Trang.