Nursing Shortage

NURSING SHORTAGE
Marian
American   University

NURSING SHORTAGE
The demand for registered nurses is skyrocketing. The number of nurses required is in short supply in the united state. Nurses are working longer hours every day to make up for this shortage. In their report, Buerhaus, Staiger, and Auerbach, (2008) stated that,   “The shortage of registered nurses in the U.S. could reach as high as 500,000 by 2025   and the demand for RNs is expected to grow by 2% to 3% each year.” There is a critical nursing shortage in the United States today, and it is not predicted to get any better. The reasons behind the shortage are simple to explain, but much harder to address. There a lot of factors contributing to nursing shortage in America and this shortage have some degrading effects to care.
The rapid increase in the geriatric population as the “Baby Boomers” approach retirement age has added to nursing shortage immensely as the nurses in that generation retire as well (Buerhaus, 2001). Additionally, there has been a lack of nursing faculty to teach in nursing schools. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2005), over 32,000 qualified applicants were not accepted to baccalaureate and graduate programs due to the lack of qualified faculty in 2004. In addition, nurses are working under poor conditions. Working under stressful conditions and working long hours cause burnout for nurses. Salary is also one other factor for nursing shortage.   The pay rate has fallen drastically over the years. By 1994, however, nurse wages began to decrease and he attributed the decrease in earnings to the spread of resource restricting managed care systems, hospital restructuring, and an overall economic recession (Buerhaus, 1998).
With this growing numbers of factors contributing to nursing shortage, patients are not getting the quality of care that they deserved. With nurses working long hours, patients care suffers as the nurses are burnt out. The nursing... [continues]

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