ILLINOIS NURSING IN CRISIS | A Comprehensive Survey Reveals a Continuing Systemic level of Staffing Shortages, Moral Distress, and Attrition Among Registered Nurses

For over two years, the COVID-19 pandemic stressed nurses and tested their skills and stamina. Preexisting nursing shortages deepened, leading to heightened workloads and severe burnout among nurses. Now, in the aftermath of COVID, a new survey reveals a continuing crisis of nurses’ mental and physical well-being, patient care quality, and the overall public health … Read more

Registered Nursing in Crisis | National Survey Reveals Insufficient Staffing, Severe Moral Distress, and High Turnover

Registered nursing faces a crisis. For over two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has stressed nurses, tested their skills and stamina, and exacerbated labor shortages. Each of these factors have significant implications for standards of patient care within America’s health care industry.Results from a fall 2021 survey of more than 2,200 registered nurses in hospitals across … Read more

Implementing a Fair Workweek Law in Illinois | Protecting Frontline Workers from Unpredictable Schedules

Fair workweek laws, also called predictive scheduling laws, have been implemented in Oregon and seven municipalities—including the City of Chicago—to protect workers from unstable scheduling practices. Implemented in June 2020, Chicago’s Fair Workweek Ordinance covers workers at large employers in seven essential and face-to-face industries: building services, health care, hotels, manufacturing, restaurants, retail trade, and … Read more

Minority Employment in the Illinois Imaging Sector | The Impact of License Requirements on Diversity

Cover image for Minority Employment in the Illinois Imaging Sector

The biomedical imaging career path represents opportunities for middle-class incomes but does not have a population-representative diverse work force either locally or nationally. Workers are stratified by gender and race in the field of biomedical imaging.   Our research project examines this field with the aim of better understanding both sides of hiring: how potential employees learn … Read more

THE IMPACT OF RELAXING NURSE PRACTITIONER LICENSING TO REDUCE COVID MORTALITY

Nurse practitioners (NP) are well-trained health care personnel for primary, acute, and specialty care in the US. However, 32 states have restrictions on their scope of practice and Illinois is one of them. In response to the shortage of health care workers during the coronavirus pandemic, twenty-one states granted NP full practice authority to cope … Read more

DO NURSE STAFFING STANDARDS WORK: EVIDENCE FROM A 2018 SURVEY OF REGISTERED NURSES

Illinois is experiencing a shortage of registered nurses caused by insufficient staffing levels that exacerbate occupational hazards and make it difficult to retain nurses. To address these issues and improve patient care, Illinois lawmakers are considering whether to follow California’s lead and adopt safe patient limits, which would establish patient-to-nurse ratios in Illinois’ hospitals. While … Read more

NURSING UNDER PRESSURE: WORKPLACE VIOLENCE IN THE ILLINOIS HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

Among those in the healthcare industry, it is common knowledge that threats of violence ranging from verbal to physical to sexual abuse come with the territory. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) healthcare and social assistance industries are “the most common sources of nonfatal injuries and illnesses requiring days away from … Read more