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Report Identifies Keys to Nursing Shortage

Despite a growing, nationwide shortage of nurses, more than 41,000 qualified nursing applicants were denied admission to nursing school in 2005 – a six-fold increase since 2002 – primarily due to a lack of instructors. This finding is one of many disturbing trends noted in a report released this summer by PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute, “What Works: Healing the Healthcare Staffing Shortage.”  According to the study’s authors the process of educating and retaining new nurses is broken, resulting in escalating costs and waste. “Nursing education is stifled by perverse financial incentives” when compared to medical education. The federal government offers significant subsidies to facilities that educate doctors, while nursing education programs are money-losers for colleges. This results in a reluctance or unwillingness to expand nursing programs and raise faculty salaries.

But the inability to train new nurses is not the only factor influencing the nurse shortage. Retention problems plague many facilities, as nurses leave because of serious job dissatisfaction. The report found that excessive paperwork, heavy workloads and inadequate staffing have led to increased dissatisfaction for nurses. Interestingly, the authors found that hospital leaders are in a “state of denial” about this dissatisfaction, believing that it is not an issue in their own hospital, even though they accept that it is a problem for the nurse workforce in general.

Some 450,000 licensed nurses are not working at the bedside.

The authors estimated that by 2010 the number of RNs in the United States will begin to decline and that by 2020 there will be a shortage of 24,000 doctors and nearly 1 million nurses.

The use of temporary nurses has become “a way of life” in many hospitals, rather than a stop-gap measure to alleviate an unanticipated staffing shortage – the study points out. Temporary nurses account for an average of 5 percent of all nursing hours, according to surveyed hospital executives.

The authors recommend four key strategies they believe can improve the health care workforce:

  • develop public/private partnerships;
  • encourage technology-based training;
  • design flexible roles for health care workers; and
  • establish performance-based metrics.
     

While these recommendations are good first steps, AFSCME knows it will take other significant changes to attract more people to careers in nursing. A voice in working conditions, respect on the job and reasonable workloads are but a few strategies that can immediately and significantly reduce job dissatisfaction.

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