Despite desperate warnings from health officials and pleas from doctors and nurses for people follow coronavirus safety guidelines, one South Bay hospital is totally full, including in their intensive care unit. Our nurses are handling it, they re okay, but I don t know if they can handle for long-term.
There are many explanations for the current nursing shortage.
Joanne Spetz, director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF, explains one reason. Traveling nurses, who often fill in the gaps in different locations when there s a shortage, have been grabbed all over the country by different hospitals, and now that California is going into its surges a little bit later than a lot of other states, a lot of the traveling nurses are already in contracts to help out in Michigan and Philadelphia, in Tennessee.