Jacky Zheng, COL ’25, Blue Bell, PA
Over eleven weeks, I have spent my time with Pinnacle Healthcare Staffing, a startup that seeks to bridge the current nursing staffing shortage with improved employer support. Within the company, my role was a researcher who sought to dive into these issues firsthand via literature review and media analytics. As an intern, I synthesized research papers and presented my findings regularly to a team of ten, helping guide policy and market decisions based off of the priorities I found. As a young startup, Pinnacle Healthcare was still in its early stages of finding its direction as a novel company seeking to change the healthcare landscape for the better, so my priorities were in laying groundwork for future interns and hires to more quickly fill the shoes that I did. By introducing prospective healthcare and nursing advocates to the current staffing crisis, I hope to make a lasting impact on alleviating the nursing crisis within the Philadelphia area.
I am thankful for the funding that Career Services provided me because without it, I would not be able to afford the rent, food, and other utility expenses necessary to keep myself in the city long enough to pursue this opportunity. Because of the nature of the company and its position as a startup, the funding that Pinnacle was able to provide was comparable to many others in the industry: insufficient. There is not much money to be made in an ecosystem of supporting nurses while employing them as well, and I learned much about the challenges facing how and why nurses remain unemployed in the face of some of the greatest demand this country has ever had for them.
This summer, I had the opportunity to learn firsthand why healthcare from a nursing perspective is dire. I had the opportunity to help my peers understand the motivations and economic factors leading to major issues such as nursing burnout, underappreciation, and ultimately turnover. As the largest career in the healthcare industry by total employment and number of qualified people, nurses serve an indispensable role in the way we make and keep people healthy. As a critical step in the healthcare process, the nation as a whole has an obligation to keep our nurses healthy so that they can in turn keep us healthy. I am honored to have the opportunity to learn why this is the case, and how social workers and the private sector alike are working to alleviate the crises brought on by underlying issues within how nurses are compensated, treated, and perceived.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2024 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here
