Why Nurses Are Quitting in Droves

Some people who were pretty excited by Apple's first foldable phone got pretty frustrated when the $2,000 duos screen stopped working. Plus, a new ceasefire offers a lifeline to a Ukrainian city full of starving people, thanks in part to Melania Trump. And nurses are quitting their jobs more often. That's bad news for hospitals and for patients. I think retention is one of the most pressing problems in the country. It's Tuesday, October 27th. I'm Alex Oceola for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. First up, some breaking news just as we publish. Luxury real estate brokers Tal and Orrin Alexander, along with their brother Alon, have each been sentenced to 30 years in prison. Earlier this year, a jury convicted them of sex trafficking, orchestrating what prosecutors described as a years-long playbook of luring women with luxury experiences and then drugging and raping them. The three brothers told the judge that while they regretted past behavior, they hadn't committed sex trafficking. Getting your hands on the new iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone has been difficult. Demand for it is way ahead of supply. But for the customers who have been able to get it, some have found an unpleasant surprise. The $2,000 phone screen got messed up really quickly. The journal spoke with several customers who had this issue. The flip phones hinge can get stuck and then there's a loud pop and bright streak show up in the middle of the display. Apple's aware of the problem and says it affects a "small number" of phones, though they didn't give a number. The company is not doing a recall and says that if customers have issues, they should get in touch with Apple for a replacement phone. And in markets today, the anthropic-inspired rally continued for a second day. Tech stocks gained and the NASDAQ closed up 1.2%. The S&P also rose while the doubt was almost unchanged. Turning now to international news. In Israel, voters turned out in record numbers today for an election that many see as the most consequential in the country's history. There were long lines at polling places and the country's elections authority said that around three-quarters of all Israeli voters had cast their ballots with two hours still to go before polls closed. That put turnout on course to surpass any previous Israeli election. For more analysis on what that means for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who's seeking another term, go to WSJ.com. Brazil has canceled the passports of Flavio Bolsonaro, who just lost the presidential election to Luiz Ignacio Lula de Silva. A Brazilian official told the journal that Bolsonaro had defied an order from the country's Supreme Court to turn over his passport. He's under investigation in Brazil for financial crimes, which he denies, and was ordered not to leave the country after losing Sunday's election. Today, authorities were investigating reports that Bolsonaro fled to Argentina on his way to the U.S. His spokesman didn't respond to requests for comment. British prosecutors have charged two men with national security offenses connected with last month's foiled attack on a UK base that was home to U.S. military aircraft. Both men are British nationals. One was charged for inspecting a "prohibited space" while the other was charged with assisting a foreign intelligence service, which police believe is Iran. Though the first two to be formally charged in the incident, six other men who also had been arrested are out on bail and haven't been charged. In Ukraine, a temporary ceasefire took effect today in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, where about 2,000 civilians have been trapped and starving since food deliveries stopped in May. This pause in the fighting was coordinated in part by first lady Melania Trump, and the ceasefire is supposed to allow for evacuations of the people still living there and for aid deliveries. The U.S.J. foreign correspondent Ian Lovett joins me now from Berlin. Ian, what has been going on in Oleshky over the past few months? The civilians who remain in Oleshky have been effectively cut off from any other town. All of the roads in and out of the town have been heavily mined and are also police by drones. And so vehicles delivering aid and food have not been able to reach the city since May. And a few people have been able to get out on bicycle around the foot. Nobody who has any trouble walking long distances has been able to leave. Wow, and so for residents who are there, how are they surviving? I have spoken to some residents there who got out recently, and they say that people have really taken to growing food in their own gardens, and that also people have been scavenging in destroyed buildings looking for canned goods. So it is really a very desperate situation. What is happening right now? Have the evacuations begun? Have Russian forces started clearing the landmines? What are they doing? The ceasefire just began at 3am Ukrainian time. Both sides are making sure that the ceasefire is really going to be observed. I'm not certain when the Russians plan to start clearing the landmines, but that will obviously happen first. And then it will be allowed into the city. And then residents have been told that on Friday at 10am, they should be outside of the hospital if they want to leave. One interesting aspect of this story is that first lady Melania Trump was involved in orchestrating the ceasefire. What do we know about how that came about and her role in this? So we don't know a whole lot about Melania Trump's role in these negotiations at this point. Ukrainian officials have credited her with helping coordinate the ceasefire. Her office certainly has been in touch both with the Ukrainian side and the Russian side, but not many details of what those talks looked like have been released. I can't say the Ukrainian officials have been trying to draw attention to this situation all summer and now into the fall. So in addition to the first lady, also Pope Leo has taken an interest in this. And so I think the Ukrainian publicity campaign about the Leshky has successfully put a little pressure on the Russians to do something about it. Why did Russia agree now to the ceasefire? I spoke to an analyst, a Russian who's now an exile about this, who said the Russian regime and President Vladimir Putin have gotten some recent wins from the Trump administration, especially the suspension temporarily of sanctions on Russian diesel. And so it's important for them at the moment to at least give the appearance of being malleable and giving the Trump administration some of the things that they want. And this is a very easy thing to give them. It's not a strategically important location, but President Putin still thinks that the longer the war goes on, the better position Russia is going to be in. I don't think there's any reason to extrapolate from this that Russia is interested in some sort of broader ceasefire. That was WSJ4 and correspondent Ian Loveitt. Thank you, Ian. Thank you very much. Coming up, nurses get paid well and they have pretty good job security. So why are so many of them quitting their jobs? One story after the break. In many of the most recent jobs reports, there's been a consistent bright spot in the labor market. Healthcare. Nurses especially are in high demand. They earn a median income of nearly $100,000 per year and their work is hands-on, meaning it's pretty protected from AI. And enrollments at nursing schools have jumped. But once they're actually working, there are problems. In fact, nurses are quitting in droves. Page Campbell has seen it. She's a 33-year-old ER nurse near Destin, Florida. And though she started working as a nurse during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she says the conditions that came after are the ones that contributed to her burnout. I have cared for four and five ICU patients myself simultaneously. And under National Guidelines, the recommendation for ICU patients is one nurse to two ICU patients. And so the staffing leads to burnout. We did not enter this profession to do harm. We did it to do good. We entered this profession to heal others. Journal reporter Tipping Chan has been following the story and is here now with more. Tipping, let's put some numbers on this with data from NSI Nursing Solutions, a nurse placement firm. 15 years ago, bedside registered nurses had an 11% turnover rate. Last year, that was up to 18%. Part of the reason, as we just heard from Page Campbell, is because of short staffing, what else is making nurses quit? Some of what is driving it is simple exhaustion and burnout. The workload has just really changed a lot. We have seen a health system that has gotten more efficient, such that we have fewer hospital beds than we used to, and then the ones that remain are also being occupied more continuously. At the same time, we have seen what some nurses would describe as almost a coarsening in attitudes among patients and their families. You have a health system that has also seen weight times going up in ERs. So you have people who are vulnerable and sometimes snapping in these really horrific ways. And I will tell you, nurses will say, this is horrible, we should not be expected to endure this. And also simultaneously, we understand why this is happening because we are asking patients to wait. You know, I talked to one nurse who's saying that she has seen people wait 30 hours for care. And these are people who are also at a breaking point. If you look at the stats there has been a rising trend over recent years of workplace violence. And you also hear from a lot of nurses that will just say they are routinely screamed at going to work and not surprisingly like that is a pretty strong deterrent to making someone want to stay. What kind of impact does this turnover have on hospitals? Yeah, so it is extremely expensive, of course, to lose a nurse because you're going to have to pay to backfill that position. It's also a big cost to the system in other ways too because if you're losing experienced nurses, that is going to cost you when it comes to ability to work efficiently with other people on your floor with being able to triage, you know, building on all those years of experience. And that can show up in everything from rates of falls or IV associated infections like lots of outcomes that patients care a lot about. If you have a lot of nurse turnover that absolutely can impact the kind of care that you're receiving. So what are hospitals then doing to try to retain nurses to be, you know, bedside nurses as you're saying? There's a lot of different tools that people are turning to, things like creating residency systems to try and offer more support for nurses, especially in those early years. Others are offering more pay and that something that can be really helpful too, right? If you are going to put up with really difficult work conditions, it helps if it feels like you're being compensated adequately for them. And nurses have been pushing for many cases more safety, more protections generally, whether that's metal detectors or reconfiguring floors. When you speak to hospitals that have tried different sorts of efforts, many of them had found a lot of success. That was journal reporter T'Ping Chen. Thanks T'Ping. Thank you. And that's what's news for this Tuesday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Pierre Vienna May with supervising producer Tally Arbell. I'm Alex Ocelef for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.