Nursing Shortage and Its Future

Health Care Resources
The current part of my career and passion is in nursing education. Attempting to help with the nursing shortage and increase the number of graduating students is a very rewarding job. Currently the nursing faculty is closer to retirement and new younger faculty doesn't seem to be advancing much at all. The United States is in an extraordinary deficiency of registered nurses. There is no expected end to this shortage and it is affecting all age groups and all areas of healthcare. According to the projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS); there will be more than one million vacant positions for registered nurses (RN) by 2010 due to growth demand for nursing care and net replacements due to retirement." (Hecker, 2001). Data from the 2000 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses estimated that 39 percent of RNs employed in nursing held baccalaureate or master's degrees in nursing. (Spratley, Johnson, Sochalski, et al., 2001). That means we are looking at numbers in the shortage reaching some where around 390,000 nurses with bachelors and masters degrees. We need more prepared faculty to help increase the numbers of nursing students. The changes projected by the future are going to have a negative affect on my future career if we are unable to increase the number of graduating nursing students.

My career in nursing and nursing education is my key to help the future of health care and make a positive impact on nursing. One of the reason we are not graduating as many nurses is the lack of faculty. My teaching and advancing my degree will only help increase the number of students that enroll into the nursing program. My greatest frustration in my career is having the number of nurses that are fed up and tired of nursing, just give up and go to other professions or careers. Our nursing shortage is only getting worse with the amount of nurses leaving their professions. We as nurse educators are trying to reduce the amount of frustration and help put an end to the shortage of nursing. Showing the nurses how much value is in our contributing to bringing more nurses to the work force and helping the shortage is what we need to get more nurses involved in teaching. The pay for teaching is getting more attractive and that is one of the contributing factors that were preventing nurse from going into the colleges. Now that the wages are improving, maybe we will see more nurses want to get involved.

References

Gwyther, L.P., George, L.K (1986). Caregiver Well-Being: A Multidimensional Examination of Family.

Donelan, K., et al. (2002). Challenged To Care: Informal Caregivers in a Changing Health System. Health Affairs

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