Jenny Ralston craned her head from her hospital bed to peer around the bathroom door as a man in a white coat checked her charts.
“So I’m going home, honey?” she said, adjusting her powder-white sun bonnet. But she wasn’t asking her doctor if she was going home - she was telling him.
“Tomorrow,” he said, only half listening to her as he looked at her chart.
“Nuh-uh,” she said, shaking her head in defiance. “We’re going to have a big argument about this today.”
Ralston, 45, leaned over and motioned for the nurse, Heather Garrettson, to come closer.
“I’m going home if I have to sign myself out,” she said quietly, so the doctor wouldn’t hear her. “I won’t argue, but I’ll still win.”
Garrettson, a second-year MSU nursing student, laughed and gently shook her head.
Ralston was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia in 1999 and has been in and out of the hospital since then. She came to the Ingham Regional Medical Center, 2727 S. Pennsylvania Ave. in Lansing, last week after contracting bronchitis.
But during her frequent visits to the hospital, Ralston has become concerned about more than her health. Like hospitals across the nation, those in Lansing are experiencing a severe shortage of nurses.
And that lack of staffing can lead to numerous problems.
“The nurses are just so frustrated and so overloaded,” she said. “I’ve seen mistakes. It’s because they’re so short-staffed.
“There’s a lot of days I could see them just running. I told them to leave me alone and tend to the ones that are really sick.”
Ralston has observed the nursing shortage firsthand from her hospital bed - but she isn’t the first person to discover the problem.
Marilyn Rothert, dean of the MSU College of Nursing, wrote a report addressing the issue of the nurse scarcity in Michigan.
The report, released this past summer, is part of the series, “Informing the Debate: Health Policy Options for Michigan Policymakers.” The chapter Rothert wrote, “Nursing Workforce Requirement for the Needs of Michigan Citizens,” gave reasons - and solutions - for the nursing shortage in Michigan.
Rothert cited several causes of the shortage, including people choosing better opportunities and an aging nursing population with a decreasing number of nursing students.
“Forty-six is the mean age for nurses to retire,” she said. “That means more and more nurses are going to retire in the next three to five years.”
Nursing has traditionally been viewed as a woman’s career, but many women have a wider variety of career options available to them today, Rothert said. That means the pool of people to replace retiring nurses is shrinking rapidly.
Carol Hill, a nurse practitioner at the MSU Nursing HealthCare Center at Ingham Regional, said when she became a nurse 40 years ago, there weren’t many other choices for her.
“You didn’t see a lot of women in positions at that time,” she said. “Now women have more opportunities, and nursing doesn’t attract them as much.”
The nursing center is an independent, nurse-run clinic. Many nurses in the clinic, such as Hill, have higher levels of medical training and practice a limited amount of medicine.
The center’s nurse manager, Diane McLeod, said she’s expecting her staff to shrink by two registered nurses soon.
“We have difficulty recruiting because there’s not that many nurses,” she said. “A lot of it has to do with the change in the health-care system and the increase in the workload and the increased responsibility of a (registered nurse). RNs have a greater decision-making ability, because you look at the entire patient.”
Some hospitals such as Sparrow Hospital, 1215 E. Michigan Ave. in Lansing, might have an easier time recruiting nurses because of the incentives they offer.
“We’re proactive about recruiting nurses,” spokesman Russ Leonard-Whitman said. “We just make sure to do the things to get the nurses we need.”
Leonard-Whitman said the hospital offers a bonus to staff who refer nurses.
“We pay people to recruit nurses for us,” he said.
And Sparrow’s approach is showing some success. While 12 to 15 percent of the nation’s nursing positions are unfilled, only 7 to 8 percent of Sparrow’s nursing positions open, Leonard-Whitman said.
“We are not experiencing the shortage like the rest of the world,” he said.
But while hospitals struggle to cope with this challenge, patients like Ralston are counting on an increasingly burdened health-care system. After two years of battling cancer since her March 1999 diagnosis in, the disease went into remission.
But she relapsed in June, putting her back into the frequent care of nurses.
“These nurses are excellent here,” she said of Ingham Regional, motioning toward a nurse. “There’s nothing more rewarding to help someone who’s sick, and I would do it in a heartbeat if I could.”
Registered Nurse Christine Brown said while she also thinks it’s rewarding, nursing has its downfalls.
“I have moments of regrets,” she said. “I don’t know that nurses have the support they need. Sometimes I feel like it’s an uphill battle.”
Brown said she’s experienced the shortage where she works on the fourth floor of Ingham Regional.
“It seems like the patient load is more increased compared to the amount of staff we have,” she said.
Despite the larger workload, some nurses, such as McLeod still stay in the position. After nursing for 20 years, she said it isn’t just a job - it’s a lifestyle.
“The occupation isn’t separate from who I am as a person,” McLeod said. “I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t a nurse.”
Nurses work long hours and aren’t paid as well as they could be if they had chosen a different profession, but Hill said none of that matters to her.
“I just had a man who told me he liked coming to our clinic because he knew we cared about him and that’s worth a million dollars right there,” Hill said.
“That’s what nursing is - caring for people.”
Amy Bartner can be reached at bartnera@msu.edu.
