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Wednesday, November 14, 2001

By Jim McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Registered nurses in Pennsylvania are so disgusted with their jobs that 56 percent responding to a survey on working conditions said they would never enter the profession again if they had to do it over.

Nearly half, 46 percent, of the 6,000 polled by the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses & Allied Professionals said they intended to leave nursing altogether, half of them in the next five years.

"They paint a stark portrait of a profession and a health- care system in crisis," Pearl Kolbosky, a vice president at the union and registered nurse at Jeannette District Memorial Hospital in Westmoreland County, said yesterday.

The union distributed 60,000 surveys to nurses who work in hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities and for home health-care agencies. An estimated 26 percent of the 6,000 who responded belong to labor unions.

As might be expected, the nurses who replied argued for better compensation -- wages, pensions and benefits -- and improved staffing. They said conditions continued to deteriorate for RNs who must care for more and sicker patients.

Nearly 70 percent of the respondents said their facility is short-staffed most or all the time, and another 28 percent said their place of work was understaffed some of the time.

They complained of spending too much time away from the patient's bedside answering telephones, doing clerical work, transporting clients, collecting food trays, emptying bed pans and performing janitorial duties.

Health care facilities are responding to a shortage of nurses by paying signing bonuses, using temporary agencies and seeking government help for tuition reimbursement and student loan forgiveness, Kolbosky said.

"Those are a Band-Aid on a bed sore," she added. "What we need to do is make long overdue changes in working conditions for nurses and compensate them fairly. Until we do that, nursing will remain a hard, hazardous, low-paying job that nobody wants to do."

The survey was released to support recently introduced state legislation that would ban or restrict mandatory overtime for nurses. The union also is pushing for minimum nurse-to-patient ratios similar to those being established in California next year, and increased government funding aimed at improving staffing levels.