Editor’s note: This commentary is by Kirsten Berggren, a nurse practitioner at the UVM Medical Center.
[I] have been reading lately about Gov. Phil Scott’s efforts to recruit more working-age people to Vermont.
I work as a nurse practitioner at UVM Medical Center, and have been involved in contract negotiations as well as the recent strike. Putting those two things together, there seems an obvious solution to the drain of quality workers from Vermont (according to census data, in 2017, 918 more people moved out of Vermont than moved in). If UVM Medical Center hired more nurses, and paid them a competitive wage, they could single-handedly solve the drain of workers from the state.
Talk to nurses who work at UVMMC. It won’t take long to find one with a story of a young colleague, a talented nurse, who started their career at UVM. These nurses stay three years, four years, maybe five, getting excellent training at our academic medical center. Then you know what happens? They leave. They don’t just go to other hospitals, they go to other states. They realize that there are places where they can buy a house on a nurse’s salary and don’t have to live an hour away from work to be able to afford it.
Nurses are exactly the type of people Gov. Scott is trying to recruit and retain in the state. A generally young workforce, highly educated, who value health and wellness and education. Think about that time there was a nurse living in your neighborhood — you always had someone to ask if you should go to the doctor or not, someone who would clean the kids’ scrapes and bandage them up, someone you knew was doing good work in the community. Why would we, as a state, not be working harder to keep nurses here? Which begs the question, why the deafening silence from the governor on the strike and contract negotiations?
With UVMMC now owning hospitals and clinics from Barre to Middlebury, recruiting and retaining nurses provides benefits well beyond Chittenden County.
But go back and talk to the nurses who have stayed about why they’re here. Nurses work in Vermont not because of the compensation, but in spite of it. Nurses who choose to stay here are doing so because of strong family connections, or because of a spouse or partner’s job. What if it was different? What if Vermont became known nationally as a great place for nurses to work? What if there was national competition for nursing positions at UVMMC? Not only would that reduce turnover and burnout at the hospital, but think of what it would do for our communities, for our schools, for our state. (And think of what it would do for the quality of care at the hospital, if all of the nurses there felt valued and respected for what they did, and had enough colleagues and time off to not feel exhausted all the time.)
It’s time for the state government to get behind the effort to give UVM nurses fair competitive pay, to see that increasing the number of talented young workers in the state requires keeping our nurses here.
