By Sabrina Singhapattanapong
Daily Bruin Contributor
Having to pay more to hire temporary nurses to combat
California’s ongoing nursing shortage, the UCLA Medical
Center has had to lean on its main funding sources, such as
insurance companies, Medicare and Medi-Cal, just to break even and
not lose money.
As a result, the hospital has not been able to generate income
for the past three years, according to Sergio Melgar, the Medical
Center’s chief financial officer.
Increases in patient traffic over the past few years, coupled
with the nursing shortage, has prompted the university to hire
staff in all areas, including per diem nurses ““ who are
called to work whenever the Medical Center faces shortages ““
and nurses hired through outside agencies.
According to Melgar, rates paid to per diems are 20-25 percent
higher than those paid to permanent hospital nurses.
Since salaries make up more than 50 percent of the Medical
Center’s costs, and more than 1,200 nurses are employed at
the Medical Center, hiring more per diem and agency-hired nurses
has contributed to the hospital’s increasing costs, Melgar
said.
“It has made it very difficult for the Medical Center to
actually generate any sort of (profit) because the cost of
personnel has continued to increase at a rate faster than the
revenues we generate,” he said.
Without any losses or gains in income, the Medical Center has
become more cautious with its spending, especially with its
replacement center under way, Melgar said.
The higher salaries at other agencies have triggered nurses to
leave the Medical Center because they can earn up to $20 per hour
extra working elsewhere, Melgar said.
Aside from cost increases, the shortage has forced the Medical
Center to turn patients away at times.
“If we get to a point where there’s another patient
looking to be transferred in, but we don’t have the staffing,
we basically are closed at that point,” Melgar said.
“It doesn’t happen infrequently. It happens probably
every week,” he added.
To ensure quality care, Melgar said, the Medical Center will not
take on more patients if it does not have appropriate staffing.
UCLA’s average employee age has dropped by five years
because of the young new nurse graduates the hospital has
recruited. The Medical Center has also implemented a new
international outreach initiative ““ which targets nurses from
countries like England and Australia, Melgar said.
Marie Cowan, dean of the UCLA School of Nursing, said 50 percent
of California nurses are educated outside the state due to the lack
of undergraduate nursing programs in the state.
Nursing students are placed on wait lists since enrollment in
the 22 undergraduate nursing programs in California are already 98
percent full, Cowan said.
A lack of undergraduate nursing programs across the nation,
especially in California, has contributed to the nursing shortage
faced by hospitals, Melgar said.
“California does not have enough nurses. Even if we
collectively, as a state, hired all the nurses that graduated from
California, we wouldn’t have enough,” he said.