an In The Media Appearance
"Nurses Deserve Better. So Do Their Patients." - New York Times. 08/12/2021
Linda H. Aiken of the Population Aging Research Center (PARC) at UPenn, calls for action to end nurse understaffing in hospitals, nursing homes, and schools in a New York Times op-ed.
“…While we long to go back to pre-Covid life, returning to chronic nurse understaffing in hospitals, nursing homes and schools would be a big mistake. We owe nurses and ourselves better health care resources. The so-called nurse shortage has become an excuse for not doing more to make health care safe, effective and patient-centered. State legislators must do their job. Health care leaders must fund enough positions for nurses and create reasonable working conditions so that nurses will be there to care for us all.”
Dr. Aiken is an authority on (1) causes, consequences, and solutions for nurse shortages in both the U.S. and internationally (2) the demography of nursing: global nurse migration, its consequences, and solutions in developing and developed countries, and (3) the study of returns on human capital investment in nursing (formal education and standards, plus its interaction with the nurse working environment) on outcomes for patients and for the efficiency of the health care system. As founding Director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) established in 1989, she has directed a series of large-scale studies in the U.S. and abroad about the impact of nursing on outcomes for patients with chronic illnesses, those undergoing common and specialty surgical procedures, and for persons with AIDS, cancer, and the seriously mentally ill.