I spent many years running a float pool of more than a thousand nurses. It was the most humbling leadership experience of my career, not because of budgets or staffing ratios or emergency surges, though we had plenty of those, but because of the countless, invisible barriers that determined whether a nurse actually made it to a shift. If we want to rebuild and sustain our nursing workforce, we must make one fundamental shift: Stop treating transportation as a personal problem and start recognizing it as a workforce strategy.
People assume nurses leave the profession because the work is hard. What they often miss is that burnout does not begin at the bedside. For many nurses, it begins in the dark, early hours of the morning, sitting behind a steering wheel with drowsy eyes, or standing alone at a bus stop hoping the last route of the night still shows up.
