Recession hits area’s nursing profession

For years nursing has been known as one of the easier jobs for graduates to find after receiving a degree.

Students would typically have a job lined up before graduation and ease into the workforce.

One would think this would still be the case due to the nursing shortage that Melanie Green, dean of nursing at Our Lady of the Lake College in Baton Rouge, said is only expected to increase by 2020.

However, like other college graduates in all fields of study, recent nursing graduates are having a tough time finding jobs right away, too.

Green said this is because the economic recession is causing women, who left the workforce to raise families, to re-enter it. This shift is flooding the market.

“Nursing is a predominately female profession. So in times of economic upturn these women quite often don’t have to work full time or they don’t have to work at all,” said Green. “Then, when you hit a recession such as the one we’ve had for the last year and a half to two years, what you have is their husbands’ jobs become threatened or they actually lose them. Either one of those causes those women to say, ‘I’ve got to get back in the workforce. I’m a nurse. I can get a job.'”

Green said this causes an illusion that there are no more nursing jobs, when in fact, she said a nursing shortage still exists.

“As soon as this recession rights itself, you will see all of those people I’m talking about either go back to not working or working a little bit,” said Green. “All of a sudden, there’s going to be a huge need for all these new graduates again.”

But in the meantime, Green doesn’t want nursing students to get discouraged.

“We’re telling our students don’t panic because this is the nature of the economy,” said Green. “So they need to just weather out this turn in the economy. As soon as we begin to feel the recovery of it, they’re going to see plenty of jobs again.”

Green said nursing schools are producing about the same number of graduates as in years past.

She said current students can increase their chances of landing a job after graduation by enrolling in a nurse tech position while finishing school.

These positions allow nursing students to work in a hospital under professional supervision to supplement their classroom studies.

“I cannot recommend that highly enough,” said Green. “It gives them additional exposure to clinical facilities and the practice of those skills that goes above and beyond what they’re getting in the classroom and in clinical instruction.”

Green added a nurse tech position looks good on a resume to potential employers.

One local student who took advantage of the benefits of a nurse tech position at OLOL was Larose native Ali Plaisance.

“They’ll probably hire you on if you do well,” she said. “You make connections that way.”

Plaisance received an associate nursing degree from OLOL last year and said the connections she made helped her land a post-operative position at OLOL hospital.

“On graduation day, I was one of maybe six people that had a job lined up,” said Plaisance. “People are just trickling getting jobs, but it’s not like hospitals are seeking us out. We have to seek them out.”

Although Plaisance said it is probably easier to find a nursing job in rural areas as opposed to metro areas, Nicholls nursing student Andrea Lewis plans on moving to Baton Rouge after college to look for a job there.

Lewis, a fellow Larose native, expects to graduate in May, and thinks she could find a job in an urban area, because she is not limiting herself by looking for a job in a certain department.

“They have a lot of jobs open, but a lot of them are specified,” she said. “I’m kind of open with where I want to work, on what floor, not real specific, but I know people who are [looking for a specific job] are having a hard time finding jobs. I’m not really picky so hopefully that makes it easier.”

Lewis said a competitive advantage she might have as a Nicholls graduate will be a clinical course she is currently taking.

“You work 14 days at the hospital – not getting paid – but you work 14 shifts, and that’s your class,” she explained. “I feel like I really am prepared like I know what I’m doing. I’m ready to go to work. I feel like other jobs when you graduate you’re just starting like you haven’t done a days work yet, but clinical really has us prepared.”

Lewis said a clinical course is slightly different from a nurse tech position, but both are beneficial.

“The nurse tech position, you don’t have as much freedom,” said Lewis. “There’s a very small list of things that you can do, and in a clinical course you have to do everything that a registered nurse has to do.”

Although Lewis plans on looking for a job in Baton Rouge after graduation, she said almost all of her Nicholls classmates would like to work close to home.

But apart from the international recession, there is a fear that the recently enacted National Heath Care Reform Bill could affect the nursing profession.

Nicholls nursing dean Dr. Sue Westbrook, recently appointed to the Louisiana State Board of Nursing, said it is too early to tell how the new bill will affect the nursing industry, but she thinks it’s going to impact health care delivery in nursing services.

“How that’s going to be exactly, I’m not certain,” said Westbrook. “But I do know that it is recommended that nursing education, the way we educate nurses, will have to be transformed.”

Nicholls nursing student Alisha Angelette practices placing a nasogastric tube on a dummy. She could be one of many Nicholls graduates who has a difficult time finding a job after graduation due to the economic downturn. * Photo courtesy of NSU