Despite a decline in COVID-19 cases, the shortage of nursing staff threatens to potentially affect the quality of healthcare available says Susan Russell. She’s Chief Nursing Officer at Singing River Health Systems on the Gulf Coast. Russell says they have almost 300 vacancies and they’ve closed 68 beds within the past two months.
“But the issue is there is only a finite number of RN’s that can work in these hospitals. It’s called acute care nursing and on top of that specialty areas like Intensive Care Unit, CU, emergency room, labor and delivery, it takes another year of training to get these individuals to where they can work in those areas,” Russell said.
