Across the country, nursing colleges and universities are experiencing difficulty in their efforts to expand enrollment levels to meet the rising demand for nursing care. Several issues that magnify the problem include a shortage of nursing school faculty which restricts nursing program enrollments. Reports from 2006-2007 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing say that U.S. nursing schools turned away 42,866 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2006 due to insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and budget constraints.
The certainty of the slow rate of registered nurses entering the profession increases the demands of currently employed nurses. In the March-April 2005 issue of Nursing Economic$, Dr. Peter Buerhaus and colleagues found that more than 75% of RNs believe the nursing shortage presents a major problem for the quality of their work life, the quality of patient care, and the amount of time nurses can spend with patients.
Eventually, this type of problem leads to job burnout, job dissatisfaction, emotional exhaustion and high turnover rates. A study in the October 2002 Journal of the American Medical Association supports these findings. With fledgling nursing care, patients and families suffer as well as medical facilities in their quest to provide adequate service.
Surely, with a well-defined problem, there are resolutions underway on various levels. Methods for combating the nursing shortages are found in a July 2007 report from PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute titled What Works: Healing the Healthcare Staffing Shortage. The information involves developing more public-private partnerships, creating healthy work environments, using technology as a training tool and designing more flexible roles for advanced practice nurses given their increased us as primary care providers.
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