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by Maya Greer
When Jamie Greer left the staff garage on her last night at Littleton Adventist Hospital, someone had driven right through the parking turnstile.
“It was hanging down, snapped at this pathetic angle,” said Greer, a 45-year-old registered nurse who received her certification in 2020. “It felt symbolic. Someone had just gotten sick of it.”
They weren’t alone. As the Colorado healthcare industry moves into 2023, the outlook in the nursing industry has been bleak. Since 2018, Colorado has been over 9,000 new nurses short of meeting patient needs every year.
According to the American Nurses Association (ANA), the United States has been undergoing a severe nursing shortage since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit an already aging and poorly-supported workforce hard.
Greer became a nurse as a second career, after spending the majority of her life raising two children with an unfinished degree in Communications. She felt like her window to make something valuable of her life had passed her by, until a friend that worked at Arapahoe Community College encouraged her to apply her long-standing interest in medicine and apply to the College of Nursing. Greer was instantly incensed and ended up passing the program with flying colors in the next few years.
“I was so proud of myself when I graduated,” Greer told me, thumbing the defunct ID from her first nursing job. The one she just left behind. “My whole life, my mother pushed me towards being a stay-at-home-mom. When I finally managed to prove her and myself and everyone else wrong, suddenly the world’s ending and everyone’s quitting.”
Working as a bedside nurse at a severely understaffed hospital radically impacted Greer’s optimism about her new career. “It’s a very unsafe environment for nurses,” she explained. “When you have five patients, they end up dying, they end up falling, they sit in urine and feces longer than they probably should. Your license you worked so hard for is in danger every time you go to work.”
There were times then, and there are times now, where Greer finds it hard to tap into that old pride in her achievement. Some days she even wishes she’d stayed at home. “Most people you talk to believe they’re being underpaid for the work and the risk that’s being asked of them,” she said, pointing out that wages have stagnated and risks have skyrocketed for bedside nurses working in hospitals. “A lot of nurses are looking for a purpose, but they can’t remember the reason they got into this. And they’re trying to stay positive, but it’s getting harder.”
The American Nurses Association attributes the current nursing shortage to a graying workforce, an older, sicker general population, and a lack of interest in nursing from younger generations. Colorado’s Department of Human Services is currently offering hiring bonuses ranging from $2,000 to $7,000 dollars for bedside nurses, nurse assistants, and other healthcare positions in an attempt to bring young minds into the workforce.
Greer is skeptical. So skeptical, in fact, that she cuts me off halfway through my question. “First things first, there is no nursing shortage. There is a shortage of licensed nurses who are willing to work in the hospital system as it is.” Greer knows several other nurses, she tells me, who left Littleton Adventist and other hospitals to work in schools, sports facilities, and prisons, who have seen more safety and success outside of the overworked hospital setting.
“It’s a falsity that blames nurses for trying to take care of themselves in this system. We’re not the villains just because we don’t want to put ourselves at insane risk for nothing.” Greer says, voice almost breaking. Nurses are being told, she believes, that it’s their sole responsibility to do a thankless, dangerous job under a broken system. “I got enough guilt as a stay-at-home mom,” She jokes. “Would you do this to yourself every day out of the goodness of your heart? If you wouldn’t, don’t tell me to!”
Greer is now one of the thousands of Colorado nurses leaving hospital infrastructure desperately understaffed. Her new job, emergency room position with SCL Health, is still stressful, but in a much healthier way. “I feel like I’m finally allowed to learn again–I didn’t realize how deep in survival mode I was.”
When asked if she feels guilty about leaving an already struggling hospital, Greer hesitates. “I do,” She sighs out, finally. “But at some point, you have to know your value. I poured years of my life into becoming the person I always wanted to be. I can’t let this be the end of that.”
That, says Greer, is her message to everyone interested in the nursing and healthcare professions. “It’s an amazing world. You’ll discover you can do things beyond what you ever thought you were capable of,” She tells me. There’s fondness in her eyes. “But you’re a person, too. And if you start thinking the way I did, where you’re just thinking about driving your car into a brick wall instead of even looking at that hospital again, then you’ve got to say ‘I deserve a new job.’”
