I am a nursing professor and I have spent 18 years at the bedside in critical care nursing, including in a shock trauma platoon during the Iraq war. I am not exaggerating when I say that conditions at the bedside in today’s critical care units are analogous to a combat zone. After nearly 2 years of intense workplace stress, many nurses have stopped working in critical care.1 The critical care nurse shortage is likely to get even worse: more than one-third (33.7%) of nurses plan to reduce their hours or leave the bedside altogether within the next year.2
Hospital leaders are combatting shortages of critical care nurses by importing nurses from overseas,3 hiring traveling nurses, and, in one notable case, even attempting to use the legal system to force nurses and technicians to delay their departure for a higher paying job until their replacements could be trained....