The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that jobs for licensed practical nurses will “grow much faster than average” and that “overall job prospects are expected to be very good.” But it looks like a down economy and hiring strategies continue to douse this hiring wildfire: LPNs continue to get dumped for better-educated and better-paid registered nurses.
Akron General Hospital let go all 70 of its LPNs “as part of a decision to move to a more highly trained nursing staff,” according to a weekend report in the Akron Beacon Journal. That’s a trend that’s resulted in the trimming of LPN jobs by the dozens for years.
Plus, some states have been producing almost twice the number of LPNs as there were jobs for sometime. Meanwhile, schools and recruiters continue to tout the future boom times for LPNs and regularly roll out new programs.
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Is this an overhyped LPN job outlook, or is it simply a shift? The era of nursing job growth at hospitals seems to be coming to an end. In the case of Akron, the hospital let go LPNs who work with inpatient care. “The reality is acute patient care is becoming more complex,” Akron General spokesman Jim Gosky told the Journal. “Duties are being taken over by RNs.”
Meanwhile, many tie the future of LPN jobs to both the nursing shortage and the growth of home healthcare. To once again quote the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
In order to contain healthcare costs, many procedures once performed only in hospitals are being performed in physicians’s offices and in outpatient care centers, largely because of advances in technology. As a result, the number of LPNs should increase faster in these facilities than in hospitals. Nevertheless, hospitals will continue to demand the services of LPNs and will remain one of the largest employers of these workers.
But one has to wonder: How long will newly minted LPNs have to wait before they actually gets to practice their profession?
