Sean Erdrich, Youngduk Yun, Savannah Koob, Matthew Schiller, and Saili Raje.
Executive Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified critical issues within the nursing profession, such as burnout, safety concerns, and compensation disparities, leading to an alarming attrition rate. This paper, focusing on UNC Health, employs statistical analyses and survey data to explore these challenges and the disproportionate impact on less experienced nurses, who represent a significant portion of the workforce leaving.
To combat these issues, we propose a targeted intervention strategy at UNC Health that includes equitable compensation, enhanced psychological support, and an empirical approach to identifying and addressing the root causes of burnout. This strategy is supported by continuous evaluation through exit and quarterly check-in surveys to assess the…show more content… Behind the scenes, nurses were working countless hours with limited PPE, not knowing if they would be the next one to catch COVID-19. While nursing shortages are nothing new, the pandemic years highlighted this issue and has brought it to the forefront. Throughout the pandemic, 62% of nurses stated that their workload had increased, and 45.1% claimed they felt burned out. [1] This feeling of being burned out, led to over 100,000 nurses leaving the field, with a further 800,000 nurses expected to leave by 2021. This large of a number makes sense, since greater than half of all nurses are over 50 years of age. The piece of this statistic that is increasingly concerning leaders within the healthcare community is that 41% of the nurses who left the profession during the pandemic had less than 10 years of experience.1 Less experienced nurses cite workplace safety, compensation and underappreciation as reasons why they left the profession sooner than
