Recent economic woes have affected San Francisco’s once booming nursing industry. The state of California has seemingly had a nursing shortage every year as more registered nurses would retire or move into other positions than the number of new nurses graduating from local colleges. These nurses that were expected to vacate their current nursing positions have ended up postponing their retirement plans because their spouses lost their jobs or they have had significant losses with their retirement savings. The typical nursing turnover in some places, has dropped to a dismal 4% compared to 18% just three years ago.
Although this makes things difficult to find nursing jobs for those currently in the workforce, it presents opportunities for a hopeful future for those in nursing programs in college now. The advantage for when students graduate is that nursing has become a high demand localized industry. For example most cities have their own nursing job sites like Nursing Jobs’ San Francisco section and High Point Jobs.
Another reason for the lowered demand on new nurses is that there has been a recent drop in people’s finances so they allocate less money toward medical services even though they may need it. More and more people are losing their health benefits when they lose their job and are unable to afford health care insurance themselves. This lack of insurance has caused more and more people to delay some medical procedures, giving nurses less work to do. As the economy rebounds however, nursing and medical jobs will be the first to rise back up.
While the economy has played a major role in the lowered demand for new nurses, many public health officials feel this is only a temporary setback and expected the number of nurses that retire or move on to new positions to climb back to its normal levels in 5 to 10 years. The current low number of retiring nurses is just an unfortunate byproduct of the down economy where more and more families have to work longer than they anticipated to ensure they will be able to afford their retirement years.
Also, the increase in number of people that will require medical services is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years as the baby boomer generation grows older and will need more medical care. This increase in patients will cause a greater demand for more nurses in area hospitals. The take away from this article is that the medical industry is set to boom in the coming years and if you are thinking about pursuing a career, now is a great time to research schools with good medical programs.
Comments