Nursing Shortage Case Study

Is Nursing Shortage Really Faculty Shortage? Potential Solutions
As the United States’ population ages and the Affordable Care Act continues to be implemented the need to address the shortage of nurses and faculty is more pressing than it ever has been. However, this is multi-dimensional problem, to get to the crux of it; one has to ask what the major contributing factors to such shortages are and what can be done to prevent them? Perhaps the most significant influence to the nursing shortage is the fact that each year a large number of qualified applicants are denied entrance because of a lack of prepared nurse educators (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2014). Equally as troubling, if not more so, is according to a 2014 survey by the AACN there is already a 8.3% faculty vacancy, coupled with the age of professors with doctorates being 61.3 and master’s degrees
According to Gerolamo and Roemer (2011), faculty shortages were identified as the number one reason qualified nursing applicants are denied entrance into nursing programs. Nursing schools in the US turned away over 78,000 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2013 due to insufficient faculty; thus clearly being a significant contributor to the shortage (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2014). If the issue of faculty shortage is not addressed promptly it will result in insufficient nursing workforce, which would likely prove to be detrimental to the healthcare system as a whole (Gerolamo, Overcash, McGovern, Roemer & Bakewell-Sachs, 2014). Based on this evidence, it is imperative that nursing faculty is put on the forefront to make headway into a continued nursing shortage; if this isn’t done now, it could prove to be too little too