With the severe shortage of nurses plaguing Rhode Island’s health-care providers, logic would follow that the 70-plus nurses recently laid off by the state’s largest home-care agency wouldn’t have much trouble finding jobs.
But the registered nurses who will be out of work in July as a result of the Visiting Nurse Association of Rhode Island’s restructuring, announced late last month, could struggle to find jobs to their liking.
There are plenty of vacant nursing positions at area hospitals and nursing homes. More than 400 nursing positions at Rhode Island’s hospitals are unfilled, according to the Hospital Association of Rhode Island.
Lifespan and VNA-RI, a Lifespan partner, are working to find jobs for the laid off nurses at hospitals such as Rhode Island Hospital and Miriam Hospital.
And the drastic labor shortage at nursing homes has been well documented in recent months, offering another option for nurses.
But many of the out-of-work home-care nurses might be loath to take those jobs.
“Most of these nurses made a conscious decision not to work in an institutional setting, at a hospital or a nursing home,” said Michael Mullane, field representative for the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers and Health Professionals. “They’ve been willing to accept a lower rate of pay to be home-care nurses.”
Home-care nurses typically travel to see a half dozen patients each day, administering medications, caring for wounds and assessing patients’ ability to remain at home. Nurses also train and educate patients to care for themselves so they can remain in the home.
Home care gives nurses a sense of autonomy and satisfaction they don’t get in other nursing fields, nurses say.
“Usually the people who make the decision to go into home care end up staying there for a long time,” said Alma Egan, a registered nurse who has worked in the home- care field for more than 20 years. Egan also is the president of the Federation of Visiting Nurses, Local 5090, and the union representing nurses at VNA-RI.
“There’s more freedom, but there’s more responsibility too,” Egan said. “You’re out there on your own in the community. You see the patient as part of a family, and you’re able to see all everything a patient has to go through just to stay at home.”
Many of the VNA-RI nurses will be able to find jobs at other home-care agencies. E. Colby Cameron, president of the VNA-RI board of directors, said more than two dozen health-care providers – including several home-health agencies – have contacted the association about hiring its departing laid-off nurses.
“Our union has bent over backwards for us, and we’re working hard to get all these nurses relocated,” Cameron said. “I don’t foresee any of our nurses having problems finding a job.”
Representatives from at least two large home-care agencies, VNA Care New England and Visiting Nurse Service of Greater Rhode Island, said they have RN openings and will consider hiring nurses laid off by VNA-RI.
While these might be viable options for some of VNA-RI’s out-of-work nurses, nurse advocates say the nursing industry is headed for trouble if conditions don’t improve.
The profession has gotten more difficult in recent years, they say, because visiting nurses are caring for sicker patients as hospitals have cut their number of inpatient beds. Also, federal requirements have made it more complicated and time consuming for home-care nurses to track patients’ records.
“Nurses are feeling very undervalued,” Mullane said. “They’re not well-paid, considering the intensity of the job and the consequences of errors in their work. This (layoff) is the sort of traumatic event that could cause some of the nurses, in mid-career, to say ‘Okay, I’ve had enough. It’s time to do something else.'”
