Contemporary Issues

Contemporary Issues Paper The Nurse Reinvestment Act of 2002 will hopefully bring relief to the nursing shortage. It was passed by Congress in July 2002 and was signed by President Bush August 1, 2002.
The Nurse Reinvestment Act bill was originally introduced in April 2001 to aid in reducing the nursing shortage by increasing the number of nurses in our country and also to ensure that every nurse in the field has the skills they need to provide the quality care patients deserve. This legislation is important for nurses and patients, and essential to ensuring that our health care system can function at its best.   "This new law is seen as an important first step to addressing the nation's worsening nursing shortage and improving patient care" (Meredith, 2002).
"The Nurse Reinvestment Act establishes nurse scholarships, nurse retention and patient safety enhancement grants, comprehensive geriatric training grants for nurses, faculty loan cancellation program, career ladder grant program, and publish service announcements" (Meredith, 2002).   The nursing scholarships provide educational scholarships in exchange for commitment to serve in a public or private non-profit health facility determined to have a critical shortage of nurses. The period of time depends on how much assistance they receive. The nurse retention and patient safety enhancement grants assist health care facilities to retain nurses and improve patient care delivery through more collaboration between nurses and other health care professional and more involvement by nurses in the decision-making process.   The comprehensive geriatric training grants provide for resources to train and educate individuals in providing geriatric care for the elderly. Such resources can go to development and distribution of curricula, faculty development, and classes and continuing education. The faculty loan cancellation program provides for loan cancellation to nurses to allow full-time study and rapid completion of... [continues]

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