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Nurses Find New Life... In Nursing

It has taken only a couple of decades for Chari Bender to find her niche as a nurse.

Bender started her career in a neonatal intensive care unit, and dabbled in an outpatient surgery center and a school. She also took time off to raise her two children.

About a year ago, with her kids getting older, Bender wanted to return to nursing, but needed a job with flexibility and challenge. She applied with Nurses for Newborns, a nonprofit agency that sends registered nurses with pediatric and neonatal experience to the homes of high-risk mothers and babies.

“I really believe this is where my life was meant to funnel into,” Bender said.

High patient-to-nurse staffing ratios, burdensome paperwork and growing management responsibilities have many nurses looking for work outside traditional nursing posts in hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Some have left the profession entirely, while others have turned to home-care providers, social service agencies, pharmaceutical companies or insurers for jobs where they continue to use their nursing skills.

While hospital nursing can mean working irregular shifts at odd hours, these positions can provide more flexibility or at least a regular schedule. Some include more direct nursing care than the supervisory roles often given to registered nurses on hospital floors. They also can give nurses more autonomy over patient care decisions.

TJ Cullen-Wood, a registered nurse with Cooperative Home Care, sees a roster of patients in their homes, most of whom are elderly. She

creates care plans, educates her patients about medication and coordinates visits with physical therapists or other health professionals.

And, Cullen-Wood can schedule her home visits when it’s convenient for her schedule. She’s using the flexibility to go back to school for nursing home administration.

Learning from nurses’ satisfaction with these positions and from those who have left nursing completely could help more traditional settings attract more nurses.

“I think they’re beginning very much to pay attention to flexible scheduling,” said Gretchen Drinkard, a professor at the Goldfarb School of Nursing at Barnes-Jewish College. “There are a number of hospitals, for example, that are implementing self-scheduling, where nurses say exactly which days and hours they want to work.”

Forecasts for a registered nurse shortage in 2020 range from 400,000 to more than 1 million. An important aspect of the shortage is that some 450,000 licensed, registered nurses are not working at the bedside, according the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Moving these nurses back to the bedside would shrink that shortage to just over 100,000, about its current level, the agency found.

And, these figures don’t include nurses like Bender and Cullen-Wood, who have stayed in nursing careers but aren’t in hospitals, nursing homes or physician offices.

Joan Stoessel worked in Barnes-Jewish Hospital and SSM St. Joseph Hospital in Kirkwood before moving to home care. Now she works as a case manager for Health Management Corp., a disease management company owned by Wellpoint Inc. that provides services to the 1.3 million members of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Missouri. Stoessel also has her legal nurse consultant certificate and is considering going back for a certified case management certificate. She has been a case manager off and on for about 10 years. One break included time back in the hospital setting.

“After a year, I realized it’s not what I wanted to do because I missed that one-on-one with the patients and family members,” Stoessel said.

(c) YellowBrix 2008

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