BALTIMORE (Map, News) - The nursing industry is growing by leaps and bounds, but the demand has kept a clear lead for more than 25 years.

Maryland hospitals need 2,340 more nurses just to fill existing jobs, a vacancy rate of 13 percent, a new survey by the Maryland Hospital Association shows.

“I have 400 more nurses than I did five years ago, and next year I’ll have more,” said Karen Haller, vice president of nursing and patient care services for Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. “There’s never been a day since the government began keeping records in 1980 that demand for nursing has gone down.”

That demand creates upward pressure on nurses’ wages, benefits and general working conditions, she said. An inexperienced nurse straight out of a two-year program can earn $45,000, and a top-paid bedside-care nurse at Hopkins could make as much as $155,000.

With the graying of the baby boomer generation, Haller doesn’t see wages or demand going down anytime soon.

After two years of improvement, vacancy rates are climbing again, from 10 percent in 2005 to 13 percent in 2006, according to the MHA. Vacancies hit a high of 15.6 percent in 2001 before declining, as recruitment and training programs began to pay off.

The 2006 reversal marks a troubling trend, MHA Vice President Catherine M. Crowley said in a statement.

If nothing is done to address the problem, the association estimates Maryland will have a shortfall of 10,000 nurses in less than a decade.

A high-level group of hospital and academic leaders convened by MHA to develop a comprehensive response to the shortfall is expected to report its findings in September.

Johns Hopkins’ School of Nursing is doing what it can now.

The Anne M. Pinkard building, opened in 1998, is already overcrowded, with classes spilling into cafe space and basements. A $42 million addition is scheduled to open in 2010.

“We’re having to double up faculty in offices,” said Anne Belcher, associate dean of nursing. The school graduated 310 students this year, compared with less than 200 in 2000, when Belcher assumed her role.

On the other hand, hospitals are doing a good job keeping their talent. Of 41 positions surveyed by MHA, retention was nearly 86 percent, and 89 percent for nurses.

khille@baltimoreexaminer.com

Comments from Examiner Readers

6:22 AM MST on Thu., Feb. 7, 2008 re: "Nurses lead charge on clean, healthy workplaces"

J corbinExaminer said:
To Paxon, I feel your pain...while at work I too was injured by inhaling fumes from the products used to strip and wax the floor at the hospital where I worked. I had told the environmental employees on multiple occasions that the solvents used made me sick and asked them to wait until a day I was off to do the floors. This usually worked however on one particular day I wasd told the inspectors were coming and they had to do the floors. I ended up with not only a migrane headache but chemical burns to my sinuses that took weeks of steroids and antibiotics to clear...but the floors were clean and shiney for inspection.

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11:59 AM MST on Sat., Nov. 10, 2007 re: "New plan hopes to ease nursing shortage in Md."

Examiner Reader said:
The nursing shortage is caused, basically, by three different things: (1) "Monopoly capitalism", (2) Gender discrimination against men in nursing, and, (3) The absolute and almost arbitrary authority that clinical instructors have to fail nursing students in their clinicals. In "Monopoly capitalism", "capital" is exported from the native country instead of the finished products of production produced by the native citizenry. What is "capital"? Capital is labor, money, and industry. In the case of nursing in the USA, there has been a massive immigration into the USA of foreign born nurses such that the same now represents about 30%-40% of American nurses. "Monopoly capitalism" tends to destroy the two main attributes of "true capitalism" which are competition and free enterprise. " Monopoly capitalism tends to impoverish the native citizenry (nursing work force) which concentrating both economic and political power in the monpolists.

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8:50 AM MST on Tue., Nov. 6, 2007 re: "New plan hopes to ease nursing shortage in Md."

ER girl said:
If it means that I can be seen quicker when I am in the emergency room, I'm all for it!

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