Salaries Vary - But The Start Even Looks Good
In the mid- and late-1990s, frantic hospitals were flying in nursing recruits from broad because medical assistant salary was not a worry for them. Newspapers bulged with help-wanted ads for nurses, and competing hospitals tried to outbid each other to woo new hires.
That was a time when the percentage of unfilled slots for registered nurses averaged 21% per hospital in California. By 2003, the most recent statistics available, the vacancy rate in California was 9%, according to the American Hospital Assn., a trade group in Chicago.
At Southern California hospitals, new hires totaled 22.5% of registered medical assistant salary scale; that figure dropped to 12.8% in 2002, according to the Hospital Council of Southern California's survey of 100 acute hospitals.
The turnaround means that, to make ends meet, some of the replaced City of Hope nurses are refinancing their homes, dipping into their children's college funds or abandoning the business for new fields. Pediatric nurse Keen is scrambling for work as a temporary replacement nurse through a registry that hospitals notify when they are short-staffed. Every morning, she gets awakened by a 5 a.m. telephone call that usually tells her there's no work for the day. For a nurse who thrives on a human touch -- she used to take home the clothes of sick children and wash them if their families weren't around -- the change is jarring. "It's degrading, to say the least," said Keen, a 25-year nursing veteran. "I do have some expertise. . . . No one seems to care. No one seems to want it." Meanwhile, her husband, who owns a pool maintenance service, supports the family, which includes their two teen-agers. About 80% of the City of Hope's 450 registered nurses walked off the job on June 15 after contract negotiations failed to resolve disputes over job descriptions and time off. A week later, hospital officials started hiring permanent replacements, saying that they did not want to jeopardize patient care in a potentially prolonged strike. Fifty-one of the striking nurses were replaced because the others returned to work before replacements could be hired; and four of the replaced nurses have since been rehired. But the 47 remaining are finding that where once they could have had their pick of jobs, the pickings are now slim.
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