The patient load at North Sunflower Medical Center is picking up, but the Ruleville-based hospital is currently experiencing a shortage of nurses.
Director of Nurses Hannah Barrett told The E-T this week that the hospital has lost several nurses over the past few weeks for a variety of reasons.
“The stars aligned that way unfortunately,” she said.
Currently, Barrett is attempting to fill seven nursing positions at the hospital.
“As everyone knows, we’re in the middle of a pandemic,” Barrett said. “We’re handling things to the best of our ability. With that, and you add a nursing shortage on top of it, and it really creates problems. Our nurses are tired already, and we’re asking them to pull extra shifts on top of that, so it really makes it hard.”
Like many rural hospitals, NSMC had a lull in patient traffic at the start of the pandemic, due to many facilities canceling elective surgeries. That cut down on the number of swing bed patients coming to Ruleville, Barrett said.
Now that elective procedures are back on the table, along with an increase in COVID-19 patients, Barrett said the hospital is beginning to feel the strain when it comes to the nursing shortage.
“Everybody’s picked up on their surgeries, so we’re getting our normal swing bed patients, plus we have a load of COVID patients that are coming in,” she said. “Business has picked up as normal. We just need those nurses to help take care of those patients.”
Barrett said that NSMC nurses typically operate on a 3-2 split shift, which means they work every other weekend.
On one week, a nurse works Monday and Tuesday and then Friday-Sunday, and the next week they work only Wednesday and Thursday.
Nurses work 12-hour shifts, 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. and 7 p.m. until 7 a.m.
Barrett said many of the nurses and staff working at NSMC are from the area, but some travel longer distances to work at the facility, and the hospital would welcome commuters.
“North Sunflower is a great place to work,” she said. “Most of our people are local, but we have people who travel all the way from Grenada just because they love the size of our facility.”
