Nurses still tend to get more attention from hospital leaders than do other employees in part because there are so many and they tend to lobby hard for what they want, says Paul R. Dorf, Ph.D., APD, managing director of Compensation Resources, Inc., a healthcare consulting company in Upper Saddle River, N.J.  The company works with hospitals and other companies on compensation and employee retention issues.

"Most hospitals in the past 40 years have concentrated their efforts on certain positions such as RNs, radiological technicians and pharmacists," he says.  "Nurses are a major group that really gets a tremendous amount of attention.  Some positions may not get the level of concern that they do because you've got 25 openings for nurses.

"As organizations become much more attuned to what's going on and recognize they're in a highly competitive market, some will become better," about paying attention to other workers, Dorf predicts.

One difficulty, he says, is that many health care facilities are facing "some type of budgetary constraints."

The survey results indicate that having an RN designation boosts your salary in positions such as nursing director, regulatory compliance director, director or safety, education director, JCAHO coordinator, nurse manager, performance improvement director, quality director or manager, and risk manager/compliance officer.

This designation does not necessarily lead to higher salaries for RNs who work as directors of infection control, however, where the average salary in 2005 was $63,250 for RNs and $75,000 for IC directors without this designation.