National Nurses United

to replace us with technology. The plans range from virtual ICUs, to more telehealth interactions, to schemes that we like to call Home All Alone programs. Home All Alone programs are directly opposed to the hands-on human-to human-approach to nursing we know is the key to quality patient care. This is no surprise to National Nurses United—the hospital industry has long wanted to automate our skilled profes- sion by reducing people to a list of symptoms that can be measured by technology. As care is taken out of the hospitals, industry players will close hospitals to increase profits and leave more and more communities without full-service, acute-care hospitals. Stranding patients at home this way is just wrong! The entire reason for that patient to be admitted to the hospital is to benefit from 24/7 monitoring, assessment, and professional care that licensed registered nurses provide. Nurses, more than any other health care staff, spend the most time with patients. Do we really believe that iPads, cameras, monitors, and the occasional visit by likely lesser-skilled and unlicensed personnel are in any way compa- rable to the skilled, expert nursing care and social emotional support we RNs provide every moment of every shift? But Covid-19 has opened up the hospital industry's ambitions to normalize remote and automated care so they can decentralize patient care (in other words, cut labor costs by justifying the need for fewer registered nurses). In the face of these threats, we have to stand together to resist efforts to deskill our profession. Our strength is in asserting what only nurses can offer that no technology can: The ability to combine the physical, psychological, and emotional needs of a patient with com- passion, empathy, and advocacy to honor the dignity in all people. There are plenty of us nurses. employers want us, the public, and lawmakers to believe that they cannot staff properly because there are simply not enough nurses. That is a lie. National Nurses United has been calling the hospital industry's bluff on the so-called nurse shortage. Hospital industry executives conveniently hid behind the Covid-19 pandemic to deflect scrutiny on their decades-long campaign to decrease inpa- tient beds—particularly in units like pediatrics, deemed less profitable—and short-staff units in order to maximize profits. The result? Manufactured crisis conditions, most recently with the 2023 winter surge in RSV, influenza, and Covid-19. All of their "shortage" propaganda might trick even veteran nurses into believing that everyone's retiring and nobody is coming up in nursing. Wrong. What the hospital industry doesn't want you and the public to know is that the number of candidates who passed the nursing licensure exam has actually steadily grown. In fact, every year, the United States continues to graduate more new nurses out of nursing school than ever before. So then, the question must be asked: Why are there approx- imately one million registered nurses with active licenses who are not employed as RNs? And, consider this: Might these 1 million nurses have anything to do with the turnover rate at hospitals being the highest it has ever been, at 27.1 percent? We certainly 14 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G J U LY | A U G U S T | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 3

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