Not Enough Nurses

The pollsters from Gallup take the nation’s pulse every year by asking Americans to rate the perceived honesty and ethics of people in various professions. No surprise then that the most recent results, delivered just after the last election cycle, ranked lobbyists, lawyers, and congressmen in the lowest third of the ethics heap, territory long dominated by telemarketers and car salesmen. The steep drop in home values and the Dow seems to have fueled a similar plunge in esteem for bankers.

Yet enjoying a kind of halo effect at the highest position on the honesty scale is a group of health care professionals whose ethics are rated as “high” or “very high” by 84 percent of respondents. In fact, in the decade since pollsters added nurses to the list of rated professions, they’ve earned first place every year but one, when firefighters were included right after 9/11. We trust nurses more than pharmacists (who were rated “high” or “very high” by 70 percent of respondents) and even physicians (64 percent).

This is good news to John Welsh, a freshly minted graduate of the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, which celebrates its centennial anniversary this year. “I think people recognize that nurses are advocates who can really determine the tone of your health care experience,” says Welsh, 43. “They’re the people who are there when the doctor has left and the questions come to your head.” The public’s high regard for his new profession confirms he made the right decision leaving his first career as a journalist. Finding a nursing job also helped, especially in a contracting market no one predicted when he began his training almost three years ago, when a long-standing nationwide shortage of nurses seemed to guarantee the profession was “recession-proof.”

Of course, not much is recession-proof anymore. Hospitals across the Twin Cities have shed more than 1,000 workers in the last year, many of them nurses. Yet this reversal comes at the same time health care reformers are looking to nurses as the cure to much of what ails our system—the players perhaps best equipped to contain costs, cut down on medical errors, smooth the transition to electronic records, shore up doctor shortages in primary care, and manage the chronic conditions of the coming wave of baby boomers that could swamp our current resources.