Much is said about the state's shrinking nursing population in the Mississippi media right now. However, the question must be asked whether a nursing shortage indeed exists and if it does, how bad is it? Well, yours truly filed a public records request with the Mississippi Board of Nursing for the number of licenses issued since 2015 and the records provided were rather interesting.
2020 saw a huge drop in the number of new RN licenses issued in Mississippi as there were 502 fewer such licenses issued that year than in 2019. The trajectory of new nurses continues to fall in Mississippi although there may be some cause for hope. The Board of Nursing expect 1,350 nursing students to graduate by December. It is unknown how many will leave the state but it is a safe bet a substantial number will remain in Mississippi where they are desperately needed.The Board of Nursing issued 336 fewer LPN licenses in 2021 but expects 720 to graduate in December.
The population of active RN's fluctuates but it will probably be lower in 2021 than it was in 2020. The RN population in Mississippi grew by 2,531 RN's in 2020. However, the RN population is fewer by 3,637 nurses in 2021 although there are still four months left in the year. With some luck, the population may reach the 2019 level. The LPN population is already larger than it was last year.
Much is said right now about the nursing shortage. The purpose of this post is to inject some stats into the conversation. All that is said is there are 2,000 fewer health care workers or nurses. Has anyone actually verified the number of asked for a breakdown?
40 comments:
The fact that there were fewer NEW nurses in 2020 is a non-starter as a statistic when there were 2500 more licenses issued in 2020 than 2019. Statistics are a wonderful thing and can be played however anyone wants to plat them. Yes, there were fewer LPNs while there was an increase in RNs.
The 2021 licenses mean little until the end of the year assuming that the renewals occur throughout the year - will have to wait four months to see what this 'statistic' means.
Probably the true statistic that matters is how many nurses are actually practicing and how many have gone to the house; assume many have due to the long work hours the pandemic has caused. And now some of the non-believers in medicine are complaining because they don't want to take the jab due to their personal freedom being trampled upon.
While you claim the numbers are 'interesting', you totally neglect to draw any conclusion, project any possibilities or predict any positive outcomes. All you did was copy and paste the figures you requested and received. Remind me which school of journalism you attended and which professor recommends that style.
1:55pm
Just STFU. It’s old and inaccurate. Journalism should be about providing factual information, not editorializing about a subject or obfuscating for entertainment.
What ever your personal issue is with the blog’s owner, is just that, a personal issue for you.
@1:55PM
Copy and Paste King. Fish.
Can we get the Copy/Paste Troll to actually copy and paste his same sad attempt at an insult on each story?
The irony would make him/her much more tolerable.
@1:55PM and @2:06PM, y'all are a couple of miserable folks. If you have a problem with Kingfish copying and pasting information, why do you keep coming back to his blog? I bet y'all are the kind of people that would bitch if somebody were to give you a gold brick. Geez, go down and Dollar General and get yourselves a life.
You ain't seen nothing yet. The sh!t show coming for UMMC, Hinds and Jackson mandating vaxxes for employment unless you are lucky enough to convince them your health or religious reasons, will be felt in ways you UN-AMERICAN folks cannot fathom. Imagine being in a car wreck and having , if you are lucky, one experienced trama Dr. on duty and maybe a nurse in the emergency room full of others. You die. Imagine state and county business being done by folks who don't have a clue how to do it. Half staff , quarter staff.....won't matter. It will be a sh!t show that will trigger all kinds of issues. Personal freedoms are our GOD GIVIN RIGHT for a reason. Wake the hell up !!
Those numbers mean absolutely nothing. Its a large number of nurses who don’t work but still renews their license and then you have travel nurses that come out of that number. On top of that the listing lpn is total bs when we need er/icu nurses and they function at the level required to provide those services.
I tell you what pisses me off. My wife had to take a several month pay cut due to revenues, yet now they are paying top dollar for travel nurses. Her department head she cannot take personal time off (she has enough) to make up the difference between the cut and her normal salary. That's BS.
@2:27 Here is how travel nursing works:
A nurse in Kansas City travels to New Orleans as a travel nurse. She makes 1.5x what she would make in Kansas City, and 1.5x what nurses in New Orleans make.
At the same time, a nurse in New Orleans travels to Kansas City as a travel nurse. She makes 1.5x what she would make in New Orleans, and 1.5x what nurses in Kansas City make.
Often, they cross paths in the airport. It makes no sense.
@2:16PM
Agreed. I believe both comments are the same person. At the same time, I don’t believe the commenter has a problem with Kingfish’s copy and paste degree. If someone points out the Sun is yellow, does it mean someone has a problem with the Sun? No, of course not.
Moral of the Story: To DEFINE a thing doesn’t mean there’s a problem with the thing.
Finally, I wish you had mentioned getting a life at Dollar General in your opening statement. Why? Cause it would’ve saved me the trouble of reading everything you wrote before reaching the end and concluding that you’re a dumbass.
Next time, cut the chase!
@2:05PM
The commenter did the exact same thing you did.
The commenter’s personal issue with the blog owner isn’t greater nor lesser than your personal issue with the commenter.
1) What’s the difference?
2) What’s the problem?
3) What’s the point?
@2:27p- Exactly!! Why would any nursing student get licensed in MS or remain in the state when they treat veteran employees that way?
It's comical folks focus on a shortage, but don't address WHY nurses don't stay in the state or even in the FIELD. It's eerily similar to teachers.
I like that language, "expect to graduate." Makes me giggle. They would have been better off stating the current number of final semester nursing students and the percentage that typically pass the boards.
@2:27PM
Who cares?
@1:55p & @2:06p- We are trying to be patient with your pathetic commentary because we realize the "journalism" you have been brainwashed by doesn't typically operate based on actual facts and statistics.
And, we ALL know what you REALLY want to say... we hear loud and clear that you aren't capable of consuming raw data and thinking for yourself. It's okay you sweet babies. The millennials will always welcome you at their coffee houses.
Hospitals around here would do better to pay the current nurses more who live here. But, they would rather pay travel nurses 2-3 times more. Travel nurses are not part of the community and do not care for the patients as much as local nurses.
Good data, but I’ve been hearing about looking nursing shortages for over a decade. The stat you don’t show is the additional burden the aging baby boomers are putting on the system (prior to covid). If the nursing numbers were flat we would still have a shortage because our population is aging and patient load is increasing (pre covid). Great time to be a heart surgeon or orthopedist.
"The fact that there were fewer NEW nurses in 2020 is a non-starter as a statistic when there were 2500 more licenses issued in 2020 than 2019. Statistics are a wonderful thing and can be played however anyone wants to plat them. Yes, there were fewer LPNs while there was an increase in RNs."
No, there weren't. There were 2,533 in 2020 and 3,035 in 2019 -- that's a decrease. You're looking at churn between two years. Just because someone is licensed, doesn't mean they practice here -- there are a TON of out of state licensees who never work a day here. They're active because of a compact license or they do travel nursing.
"The 2021 licenses mean little until the end of the year assuming that the renewals occur throughout the year - will have to wait four months to see what this 'statistic' means."
This is correct for 'new licensees' but is incorrect for Active Nursing Licenses. There could be more that get issued this year, sure, but it's a FACT that there are 3,637 fewer nurses on the role than 2020... the lowest level since before 2016.
Fact, they are stubborn things.
Probably the true statistic that matters is how many nurses are actually practicing and how many have gone to the house; assume many have due to the long work hours the pandemic has caused. And now some of the non-believers in medicine are complaining because they don't want to take the jab due to their personal freedom being trampled upon.
I can tell you that you can practice without a license. And there are fewer of those, period. That's a bad thing, which I think we agree on.
Note for Kingfish: Nursing workforce participation is really tough to gauge at a moment's notice as nurses also renew every two years, which is why you see variability in the data in odd years. It's a lagged indicator. At the end of 2020 (a renewal year -- always even) the licenses expired after the renewal period ended, which is why the number drops in 2021 (the 'aftermath' year -- always odd). You can see the pattern in 2021, 2019, 2017, and 2015. LPNs renew on odd years, you'll see the number plummet after the renewal period this year as reflected in the 'even' year 2022.
Trolls can't handle KF's success. He's been leading the market single handed for 14+ years and it drives them crazy. There's a baker's dozen of them on Twitworld wasting their miserable lives complaining about him. They think their short message diarrhea has some sort of political influence and sway. They don't move the needle. They're nothings just like Melvin.
Hey @2:36PM, @2:16PM here. I'm self-proclaimed dumbass, so what's your point?
You don't have much room to talk, because you blathered on pretty good yourself. Why don't you join those other 2 down a DG?
@2:41
It is greater and it is different. Sorry that is beyond your comprehension, your pathetic juvenile attempt at equivalency notwithstanding.
If you torture statistics enough you can get them to say whatever you want.
For the people mentioning travel nurses earning more than the staff nurses: while it is true that they earn significantly more (especially with the COVID incentives right now) they also are not getting the same benefits that the staff nurses get (i.e. retirement benefits, employer sponsored health insurance, bonuses and shift incentives specific to staff nurses only). All that to say, there is a trade off. It's not just that travelers are earning $100/hr whereas staff nurses earn $26-$30/hr. Not trying to argue either way. I think MS nurses should receive competitive pay as well to keep them in the state.
It’s all about the pay, my daughter in law with a fresh William Carey Degree is accepting a job in Baton Rouge for 37.50 a hour and a 9k bonus. With overtime and hazard pay she will easily make $ 100,000. Why would she stay here?
I can tell you why nurses are leaving UMMC, poor management. My daughter works at Blair Bateson, the nurse management practices are atrocious. Someone needs to take charge at UMMC before the managers are all that is left.
@4:02PM
Tell me how it’s greater.
Tell me how it’s different.
HINT: The answer requires logical reasoning.
I thought a comment last night was interesting. That at no time had a Supervisor, a State Official ever Thanked the UMMC employees who have stayed the course & seen to Business at hand. Involved the newly announced $10 million a week cost of using Temp Nursing Services to assist in Mississippi.
@3:35PM
Influence and sway mean the same. You don’t need to use two words with similar meaning when both are one in the same. For example: The commenter who replied to my message was dumb and ignorant.
The proper sentence: You are a dummy.
The destruction of UMMC started with Dan Jones and is continuing with Lou Ann. All of us “old heads” up there saw the writing on the wall.
I dated an Emergency Department nurse at the Baptist for about one year.
I started to think she might be the one to marry.
Then ... "out of the nowhere", she's offered a job as a travel nurse ... making about 3x what she would make at any Mississippi Hospital.
Without even a blink of her eye, she signed the contract and has never returned to the Magnolia State.
I would have done the same thing.
Another nothing troll like Melvin arrives at 7:13.
JJ is three times the site twitter will ever be. What it lacks in numbers, it makes up for in the fact that you can tell your likely neighbor to go directly and fuck himself. But it’s not like some random stranger from California telling you that, it’s like coming home
@2:05 aka Kingfish - I'm 1:55. There is no personal issue with the blog owner so you might as well back off that bullshit right now. He opines about every damned subject under the sun and finally resorts to copy and paste and you (he) explains it away by claiming he only did what a good journalist does? Bull shit!
Here; Let me copy and paste this from your post: "Journalism should be about providing factual information, not editorializing about a subject or obfuscating for entertainment." Now that you mention it, that's pretty much true; however, the latter half of your message is exactly what he does 95% of the time. I only brought it to his attention that he didn't do so THIS time. Try to keep up. Oh....and STFU
It was? News to me. I hate to burst your bubble, but there may be other people besides me who actually disagree with you. Keep going on and on.
Most of the time when you clowns accuse me of using another name, I'm doing something else such as driving where I can't comment if I wanted to but think what you want. You are going to anyway.
@2:36PM
“Kingfish’s copy and paste degree.”
Hilarious.
Where did he graduate?
Answer: Office Depot
Instead of walking across the stage in cap and gown, he walkedto the check-out counter.
@8:25PM
Opinions =/= Facts
Facts =/= Opinions
Once you learn the difference, your comments will stop wasting precious time.
Kingfish, is this the best you can do? Are these clowns the absolute best commenters on the site? Nothing but a bunch of Jakes and Elwoods. You know, I’m beginning to feel like Neo at the 1:17 mark of video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zYwdzYC3uUc
Like, I’ve literally handicapped myself to keep interested.
SuperTalk opined that the Travel Nurses (RNs) will be making $150 per hour starting on Friday.
We usually pay RNs $37 - 45 per hour.
How many current nurses in Mississippi will opt to become a travel nurse?
Relax, travel nursing isn’t for everyone. It requires leaving home and family for 6 to 13 weeks, so nurses with young kids or other folks to care for can’t do it. It also requires working long hours in strange places. And there is a reason these places need nurses and it usually isn’t good. Some nurses love the change of scenery and the money. Others like home and routine.
I have a relative who became (relatively) wealthy several years back working as a coordinating-supervisor of traveling nurse programs. He did a good bit of traveling himself, as well as coordinating the travel and assignments of other nurses.
Was he married at the time? No. Did he receive retirement and other benefits that an employee would have received? No. Did he sleep on a different pillow most nights? Yes. Did he make a lot of money? Yes, an awful lot! Did he get the hell out of this 'gerbil wheel' after three years in the cage? Yes.
I also grew up with a lot of boys who found fame and fortune, after college, working on ships shooting depths and other tasks that kept them sea-bound for months at a time. They made a whale of a lot of money. And although we were once the same age, they are now (if living) twice my age.
Happens when you mandate folks who have been in the sh!t for two years. There is a reason half of these Docs and nurses and CNA's do not want the vax ! Herd immunity can be found on the CDC site with attached definition.
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