Educational grants and salary boosts could certainly help the careers of some nurses, but these are stopgap measures. The fundamental problem is the work environment, especially in hospitals, where nurses find that they don't have the time to give patients the quality of care that the very sick and vulnerable require. Healthier patients these days tend to be treated in outpatient facilities. That leaves the sickest and frailest to be cared for in the hospital. They need more complex treatments and attention than the average hospital patient a decade ago.
Nurses complain that they are too short-staffed, overworked and undervalued to do the job.
They are also afraid of making mistakes. One of the most common is a medication error. While nurses often catch errors at the bedside, they are also the ones who end up giving a patient the wrong drug or the wrong dosage. A report from U.S. Pharmacopeia, which is maintaining a national database for hospital medication errors, does not directly blame nurses but attributes medication mistakes to overworked and distracted staffs. In its analysis of more than 6,000 errors from 56 facilities, most errors did not result in harm to the patient.