Is there a coming shortage of nurses
Earlier this year, a Gallup poll found that for the 16th year running, nurses were the most trusted profession in terms of honesty and ethical standards, with 82 percent of Americans describing nurses’ ethic as high or very high. Nurses are skilled health care professionals who look after us when we’re most vulnerable, but there’s long been a concern that there might simply not be enough of these providers to go around as demographics and care trends have changed.
In 2000, Peter I. Buerhaus, a professor in the College of Nursing and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Health Workforce Studies at Montana State University, and his team published a sobering report about the U.S. nursing workforce in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They projected that by 2020, “if the policies don’t change, we could be facing a huge shortage of nurses — more than four or five times larger than any prior shortage in the country, roughly 500,000,” Buerhaus says. “And that was because, at the time, there was a noticeable downturn in people coming into nursing — five or six years of steady declines. We said, ‘If that trend continues and we have the baby boom generation of nurses retiring, we’re in big trouble.’”
Because nurses constitute the largest group of health care providers in the country, this forecasted shortage puts many hospitals, colleges and other organizations on high alert. They needed more nurses, and the sooner the better, as the lagging number of young people choosing nursing as a profession would not be able to offset the anticipated wave of retirements from an aging workforce. The paper’s predictions spurred a number of private and public sector entities to make policy changes that would encourage younger people to choose nursing as a career… (Readmore)