Turns out that getting enough nurses to handle America's ongoing health crises isn't just a matter of getting them to graduate from nursing school as hospitals throughout the United States have been dealing with staffing shortages, even though a large number of nurses are ready to get to work.
The ongoing issue is that state boards are taking months to process and approve nursing licenses.
A new NPR investigation took a look at why it's taking so long for nurses to get their licenses and how it's caused a reported one in every five hospitals to be short-staffed.
Thirty-two state nursing boards provided NPR with their licensing records, and it was determined that over a third, or 80,000 nurses, had to wait longer than three months for their license to get processed.
Nearly one out of 10 nurses had to wait at least six months for their new license.
Prior to the surge in COVID-19 cases due to the omicron variant at the end of 2021, California was short 40,000 nurses, according to to most recent data obtained by NPR.
Courtney Gramm, a nurse practitioner from California, told NPR that she had moved to the state six months prior to getting a new job at a hospital in Monterey, CA at the end of 2020, but couldn't work because she was still waiting on her license from the state board.
"Processing more licenses would have put more hands on the deck in a time when we really needed all hands on deck," Gramm said.
The expected time it takes for a board to review an application varies by state. Usually, they are looking at the nurse's education history, do a criminal background check, and make sure the applicant passed the national exam. In Georgia says it will review applications within 15 days, while Florida handles them within 30 days, and California claims to take 90 days to review.
An underlying issue appears to be that the boards are short-staffed as well, causing these long delays without much of an explanation.
"Many boards say they're short-staffed and overworked," NPR's Austin Fast said. "California's got almost a half million registered nurses, but just a few dozen people to license them."
Any minor mistake in the application could cause it to get held up for a long period of time. Gramm said that happened with her license application, and it took seven months for the board to realize they already had her transcripts. Nearly 75% of nurses that got their licenses after moving to California had something in their application flagged.
"My transcripts were always sitting in some email in-box, and no one took the time to just go in, fish them out, attach them to my application and then process my application," Gramm said.
Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, the study showed it took more than three months for 55% of the nearly 12,000 registered nurses and licensed practical nurses to get the licenses they were waiting for from January through September 2021.
Reeny Pereira waited five frustrating months to get her license in that state. “And that made me angry, because the state really needs nurses and yet you’re delaying us to even work there,” she said.
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