The Nursing Drought
If doctors are the brains of a hospital, then nurses are the heart, the muscles, the blood and just about every other function an organism requires to thrive. Unfortunately, hospitals in the United States are experiencing an acute shortage of nurses, one that is only expected to increase in coming years and threatens the well-being of every American under a hospital's care. It's estimated that 500,000 nurses will be needed to fill vacant positions by 2016, increasing the demand for RNs by 2 to 3 percent each year.
The shortage is caused by a string of trends whose solutions are tied up in catch-22s. To solve a nursing drought, we need more nurses, right? Although the number of qualified candidates applying for entry-level nursing programs is slowing, it hasn't stopped: thousands are being turned away each year because nursing schools are underfunded and lack faculty, classroom space and clinical sites. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reports that about three-fourths of nursing schools have turned away applicants because of faculty shortages.
If the number of nurses today were to stay the same, the shortage would still worsen because of our nation's shifting demographics. As baby boomers age, they will require more healthcare. Simultaneously, many nurses (whose median age climbed from 45.2 to 46.8 years between 2000 and 2004) will retire: more than half of the RNs surveyed in a Nursing Management Aging Workforce Survey said they intend to retire between 2011 and 2020.
Nurses' Attitudes
Nurses are used to hard work, but an understaffed hospital saddles them with unnecessary strain. A nurse I spoke with in North Carolina said, "When we're continually short staffed instead of intermittently short staff, there's a high level of burnout. It affects the patient care and the patient-nurse ratio." The AACN agrees, reporting: "Insufficient staffing is raising the stress level of nurses, impacting job satisfaction, and driving many nurses to leave the profession." A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows emotional exhaustion increases when an RN cares for more patients than he can safely handle.
What's more, a resulting decrease in quality of patient care is not just speculation. Every additional patient in a nurse's workload increases the patient's chance of death by 7 percent. The Journal of the AMA believes that having more nurses could save thousands of lives every year.
Pros
If there are any positives to this national crisis, it is that many health care facilities provide RNs with incentives such as extra overtime pay and bonuses for all their hard work. As the nurse in North Carolina put it, "I will never have to worry about a job." In terms of projected job growth, vacancies needing to be filled make nursing the number one profession in the nation. 587,000 new RN positions will be created by 2016, according to government analysts. To answer the problem of nursing school enrollment, a number of online and fast-track programs have popped up making it possible to be certified in as few as 13 months.
Tags: each year, hard work, many nurses, more nurses, North Carolina, Nurses Attitudes, nursing schools