In one case, he said, one of Crystal Run's obstetricians was forced to begin an emergency Caesarean section with only local anesthesia after the only person with the keys to the medication box, the nurse supervisor, failed to respond to an emergency call.

"Few areas of the hospital have experienced the kind of resignations we have," said Susan H. McQueen, administrative nurse supervisor of the emergency room.

Like many other employees, Trudi Kirby, a nurse supervisor at Columbia Park Medical Center in Orlando, Fla., no longer wears her Columbia T-shirts to the gym or the Target food store.

Education was more important than a house, her mother had decided, and had used whatever she could save from her salary as a nurse supervisor at Bellevue Hospital to send them both to Georgetown.

About 200 nurses have been laid off in New York during the last year, union officials said; a fraction of the number terminated in California, where some hospitals are discussing removing nurses from the bedside altogether, retaining only nurse supervisors.

Her mother is a nurse supervisor at Utah State Hospital in Provo.

The oldest patient she interviewed, she said, was 95 and had been there as a patient and then as a nurse supervisor.

His mother is a nurse supervisor in the radiation oncology unit of the Warner Cancer Treatment Center in Potsdam.

And she was great as a nurse supervisor.