How do we know it's fall? All the nurses are quitting

Every September after school starts our census drops and the ER is slow. This often continues through October and then, reliably, the flu and pneumonia season starts and the hospital is hopping.

Every year without fail the same thing happens - census is down so nurses are called off and forced to use their vacation time. After a couple months of this the nurses start leaving in droves. Every year the same thing.

Then the flu and pneumonia season starts, surgeons stop taking vacations and start doing more surgeries and the hospital is full to bursting. The problem? Now there are no nurses to take care of the patients. The ER has to hold admits for hours or days, reducing the amount of patients they can process through the available beds. The recovery room is backed up because there are no nurses to take their patients.

Every year without fail the nurses that are left work a lot of OT to help pick up the slack. This causes increased stress, illnesses and on the job injuries. The hospital ends up bringing in traveling nurses - which are very expensive to use- to deal with the increased patient census.

Now granted, I don't have a MBA but I can see how stupid, inefficient and ultimately cost-ineffective this is.

First of all, new employees represent a significant cost to the institution. It takes several weeks of orientation until they are up and running independently. Why would you want to risk losing the trained nurses and have to hire a whole new group every year?

Are the increased payouts for sick time and medical leave really offset by the savings made by forcing nurses to take days off for two months? I seriously doubt it.

Is it better to have to bring in a nurse that gets one or two days of orientation or to have your own staff who are thoroughly familiar with your facility and it's policies and procedures?

My question is, how can people that have Master's degrees in business administration be so damned stupid?