Nursing Shortage

Today nurses are a major part of the healthcare system. In fact, according to Creating Programs, nursing is one of the fastest growing professions. By 2020, it has been predicted that there will be a need for 3.44 million nurses. On the other hand, although the nursing profession is considered to be fast growing, the nursing population is rapidly decreasing (Sheffield, 2). As the years go by, more and more nurses will retire, therefore resulting in a major demand for newly trained nurses for the sake of the future (Erlen, 2004, 1). According to the president of the American Nurses Association, the three factors associated with the nursing shortage are mandatory overtime for nurses, unsafe staffing practices, and an increasing number of patients

Shortage of nursing staff can lead to miscommunication, stress, fatigue, and a lack of time to spend with patients. All these factors could contribute to faulty patient monitoring, medication errors, failure to properly record patient information, and lack of responsiveness to patient needs (Gilchrist, 2). Given the importance of the health care profession, in conjunction with the effects of the nursing shortage, it is important for society to address the factors that play a role in the growing shortage of nurses and find the solutions to resolve it. One of the reasons why there is a nursing shortage is due to nursing education. With health care advancing in medicine and technology there are many more tasks placed on the role of nurses. Statistics have found that 23% of nurses hold diplomas, 34.3% hold associates

Once a clear line of communication has been established more action in general agreement can be taken. Active communication could provide the change in the working environment that many nurses need. Changing the working conditions will be a major step in showing the nursing staff that the work they do is respected by management (Erlen, 2004, 4). Also, working nurses have said that the education should be more customized to “ideal world problems”. When real world problems are taught in nursing school, it helps provide the profession with a better image than a textbook bedside nurse, encouraging more people to enter the profession, which in turn will solve the problem of the nurse shortage (Erlen, 2004, 4). With this in mind, there is still the issue of how nurses are treated in the profession. In order to combat this issue, a possible solution could be to create a committee of nurses that would be able to share their experiences and discuss solutions to combat issues in the profession. By doing so, their actions will benefit and prevent such issues from occurring again for future nurses (Erlen, 2004, 6). Not only will these committees help prevent specific experiences, but they will also empower nurses by allowing them to understand that they are not the only people who have difficult, frustrating