Professional Documents
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Nursing Shortage
Nursing Shortage
Nursing Shortage
Morgan Buchenic
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Abstract
This paper will be focusing on the topic the nursing shortage and how it affects everyone. It will
be focusing on the main points of: 1) Contributing factors, 2) impact on patient care, and 3)
Strategies to address. As a nursing student I am very interested in learning about this shortage
and all the opportunities there will be for me and my classmates in the near future. It is important
for people to become aware of this shortage and to hopefully see the numbers of nurses continue
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nursing workforce is nearing retirement age. According to a 2013 survey conducted by the
National Council of State Boards of Nursing and The Forum of State Nursing Workforce
Centers, “55% of the RN workforce is age 50 or older. The Health Resources and Services
Administration projects that more than 1 million registered nurses will reach retirement age
within the next 10 to 15 years. Insufficient staffing is raising the stress level of nurses, impacting
job satisfaction, and driving many nurses to leave the profession.” 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. Looking forward,
almost all surveyed nurses see the shortage in the future as a catalyst for increasing stress on
nurses (98%), lowering patient care quality (93%) and causing nurses to leave the profession
(93%).” According to a study in the October 2002 Journal of the American Medical Association,
“nurses reported greater job dissatisfaction and emotional exhaustion when they were
responsible for more patients than they can safely care for.”
Due to the dissatisfaction and retirement, there's a huge impact it has on the patient's. It
increases death rates. When there is a shortage of nurses there are not enough nurses to care for
each individual needing help. A research team led by Dr. Ann E. Tourangeau studied 46,993
patients admitted to the hospital with heart attacks, stroke, pneumonia and blood poisoning. The
authors found that: "Hospitals with higher proportions of baccalaureate-prepared nurses tended
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to have lower 30-day mortality rates. Our findings indicated that a 10% increase in the
proportion of baccalaureate prepared nurses was associated with 9 fewer deaths for every 1,000
discharged patients." This means that having a BSN is more beneficial when becoming a
registered nurse than just an associate's. It is more schooling but you learn more on how to care
for your patient and take care of their needs when keeping them alive. It is your job to educate
yourself to know what to do in certain situations as a nurse and if you are not sure you need to
seek help. It is important to decrease death rates, it is part of our job and such a caring
profession. It also increases nurses fatigue. They are required to care for too many patients at
once due to the shortage and can’t manage that with the amount of sleep and long hours they
have to deal with. The performance levels drop as work periods become longer and sleep loss
increases. If there wasn't such a shortage there would be a good amount of nurses in each facility
and would limit the amount of patients each nurse was responsible to care for. It could decrease
the death rates by a lot by having your attention more focused on a few instead of 6-10.
According to the Journal of Sleep Research, “Staying awake for 17 hours has the same effect on
performance as having a blood alcohol content of 0.05%.” Safe levels of staffing are essential to
providing a safer environment for all workers, especially those with responsibility for patient
(RWJF) is dedicated to improving the health and health care of all Americans. Central to this
mission is transforming the way care is delivered at the bedside to reduce the shortage in nurse
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staffing and improve the quality of nursing care.” The John A. Hartford Foundation, in New
York City focuses on improving health care for older Americans, authorized more than $40
million over eight years to support geriatric nursing programs. A key initiative is a scholarship
program that has supported more than 100 nurse scholars and fellows to conduct research in
gerontological nursing. “The California Endowment has made a sizable investment in addressing
the nurse shortage in California, through a $1.4 million grant to prepare foreign-trained nurses,
physicians, and dentists for the licensure exams that allow them to practice in the state.”
In conclusion, everyone needs to become familiar with the shortage. The shortage is
causing issues in everyday work environments. There is insufficient staffing that therefore
increases death rates. If you are in nursing or know someone who is interested in nursing speak
up and encourage them. It is a very rewarding career by helping others. It can be very stressful
but with a good amount of staffing it can decrease the stress tremendously. Nurses working long
shifts and are exhausted do not perform as effectively as nurses with adequate sleep. If there
were more nurses, nurses would not have to work such long shifts at times. There are programs
and foundations out there trying to help out with this problem so everyone can become aware of
it. Now, I hope you are better informed about the nursing shortage, Contributing factors, Impact
on patient care, Strategies to address. Spread the word. I hope to see the numbers of nurses
continue to increase as the years go on. It is a great career and it's important to have good nurses
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References
http://www.aacn.nche.edu/media-relations/fact-sheets/nursing-shortage
What happens to patients when nurses are short-staffed? (n.d.). Retrieved November 10, 2016,
from http://www.truthaboutnursing.org/faq/short-staffed.html
Clarke, S. P. (n.d.). Nurse Staffing and Patient Care Quality and Safety - Patient Safety and
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2676/
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/25/1/268.full.html
Lamond, N., & Dawson, D. (1999). Quantifying the performance impairment associated with
fatigue. Journal of Sleep Research, Retrieved November 10, 2016, 8(4), 255-262.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10646165