Paige Campbell became a nurse during the pandemic because she wanted to make a difference, landing in a Florida hospital emergency department after college. Since then she has been kicked, spat on and shoved to the ground — and last year, after an emergency patient strangled her, she left the bedside for a job remotely monitoring patients. Her story opens a Wall Street Journal examination of a paradox: nurses have never been more in demand, or better paid, yet they are leaving front-line hospital work in droves.
The numbers frame the tension. Most U.S. nurses now hold a bachelor's degree, the median salary has boomed since the pandemic to $97,550 a year, the hands-on work is not easily automated, and nursing schools are minting thousands of new graduates. Fifteen years ago, bedside registered-nurse turnover was 11 per cent, according to NSI Nursing Solutions data; it ticked up before COVID, spiked during it, eased as hospitals dangled raises — then rose again last year to 18 per cent.
The drivers nurses cite are consistent: understaffing, verbal abuse, workplace violence and burnout. The result is a workforce that exists on paper but not at the ward door. 'There is no shortage of nurses in this country,' said Jeff Doucette, chief nursing officer at healthcare analytics firm Press Ganey. 'There's a shortage of nurses that want to work in the current environment.'
For hospitals, the churn is expensive and self-reinforcing: every departure raises the load on those who stay, which produces the next departure. Retention, the report suggests, is now less about recruiting pipelines — those are full — than about whether the bedside itself can be made safer and saner to work at.
