The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the U.S. healthcare system close to its limits, putting a strain on healthcare workers at all levels. Karen Albright, RN, nurse administrator at Annapolis, Md.-based Riva Road Surgery Center, said it's become increasingly difficult to find the staff that her ASC needs.
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Question: What are you the most nervous about right now?
Karen Albright: I would say our staffing crisis. It seems like in the post-COVID [times] a lot of people spent some time reevaluating their priorities, and work did not necessarily come to the top of everyone's priority list. People found that time home with their families was more important.
We literally had six or eight nurses cut from full-time to part-time simply because they spent some time reprioritizing, or they needed to stay home with young children, or they needed to stay home with grandchildren or any of the many reasons that people opt to decrease their hours at work and increase their hours at home.
As part of a large network, I can see that this crisis is not just here regionally. It's not just in the state of Maryland, but it literally is all across the country. So I want to make sure that we have good quality care providers, and that becomes harder and harder to find. You certainly don't want to staff your center with a whole bunch of brand new people that maybe aren't competent to handle anything that comes along, because we need to handle everything that comes along.