Did you know that the current nursing vacancy rate is approximately 17%? That figure is up over 7% from last year, with over 80% of hospitals having a RN vacancy rate of over 10%, while it is taking approximately 3 months to find a nurse to fill a vacancy.

Further, the nursing turnover rate is 27.1%, and hospitals, on average, lost almost 3% of their RN workforce. Overall, turnover in the med-surg setting is the fifth highest, tied with critical care, and is up over 10% since 2021.

Fall is upon us, and despite my first name, it is my favorite season. The cool morning breezes replace the stifling heat and humidity of the summer, and the seasonable temperatures improve my chances of going for long walks.

As the seasons change, I often find myself evaluating my goals and my progress in accomplishing them since the year will be ending soon. I have certainly achieved some of them, still have time to accomplish 1 or 2 more, but there are a couple I know I won’t attain this year.

Lillian Wald was born on March 10, 1867, in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was born into a life of privilege and received an excellent education. When Wald was sixteen, she applied to Vassar in order to continue her education but was denied entry as officials at Vassar believed she was too young.

She spent the remainder of her teen years traveling the world and working as a newspaper correspondent.

Brigadier General Hazel Johnson-Brown was born on October 10, 1927, in West Chester, Pennsylvania as Hazel Johnson. She became interested in nursing at a young age and applied to nursing school when she became an adult. However, her application to Chester County Hospital School of Nursing was denied because she was black.

In 2004 Johnson-Brown told National Public Radio, “The director of nursing met us [Johnson-Brown and her sister] and said to her and myself, ‘We’ve never had a black person in our program, and we never will.’”

CEO’s May Message for the AMSN Blog.

National Nurses month is here. It’s the third year in a row that it has been celebrated for one month instead of one week.

Normally a time to recognize and celebrate the hard work nurses do every day of the year, this year’s celebration feels different, somehow. Maybe it’s the two years of the pandemic.

Maybe it’s the perception that we’ve gone from being heroes to being ‘actors’ lying about the severity of COVID, being verbally and physically assaulted for administering vaccines and doing our jobs.

As we celebrate another Nurses Month this May, I want to thank each of you for your sacrifices and your dedication to our patients, their loved ones, and each other.

Nursing is a wonderful profession which allows us to touch the lives of those we care for but also those we work with each day. Some of my most valued friendships are with my nursing colleagues who have been with me through thick and thin.

Happy spring to everyone and I wish you a wonderful Nurses’ Week coming up in May! I love this time of year as we begin to see a renewal of life and resources in nature. Flowers are blooming, leaves are returning, butterflies are merging, and there is a lot of positive energy in the universe.

This is such a phenomenal time of the year. And it looks like we may be finally getting a reprieve from COVID! Please still be cautious, but we can all be hopeful that the worst is finally behind us.

If you are like me, you are hearing about self-care everywhere lately. I will be the first to agree that self-care is important, but much of what I hear and see relates to the idea of self-care not the actual activities that it includes.

There are an infinite number of ways we can treat ourselves better, but I hear less about these strategies than about the importance of practicing self-care. I thought this month I would provide you a sample of ideas and some resources you can use to research the strategies that may work best for you.

Did you learn this skill on your own or were you taught in nursing school? If you don’t think there is a difference in assessing the patient of color, ask yourself why or why not?

British medical student Malone Mukwende asked his professors why all the textbooks and everything they were learning in medical school were focused on individuals with white skin.

Was he to glean from those lessons that even when he examined people of color, he would assess the same problems and concerns as their White counterparts?

Self-care is simply a variety of activities that improve your sense of well-being, good mental health and keeping emotions and stress under control.

Taking care of yourself is an important part of building your personal resilience, bouncing back from stress, trauma, and burnout.

By taking care of yourself, you will gain improvement in your physical health, self-esteem, protect your mental health and all of this will lead to enhancing better relationships.