Nursing Shortage

Nursing Shortage

Introduction

A sufficient supply of nurses is necessary to ensure availability of high quality and safe health care services. With such a high paced economic expansion, ageing population and population growth a looming gap is predicted in the demand and supply of registered nurses (RN). On one hand increasing population growth is expected and on the other hand decrease in the supply of registered nurses is predicted as well. Stats show that a big number of aged nurses will retire in a time of few years and trends show that most nurses retire early. It is seen that, every year among those nurses who join the workforce, proportion of fresh graduates and immigrants is highest. With such predictions immediate interventions are needed to change a shortage of registered nurses.

Thesis Statement

A shortage of registered nurses is predicted in upcoming years and to tackle with this problem an intervention is needed to be made immediately. This assignment will cover the identification of problem in depth, the factors affecting supply and demand of RNs and measures that need to be taken to resolve the predicted problems.

Identification of the Problem

To properly identify the nursing requirements and their availability, a comparison between the supply and demand of nursing workforce will be carried out. International trends on nursing shortages and their effects of shortages in the US will also be made.

Health Care Services and Nursing

In this section, the importance of nursing in the health care sector will be covered. Nurses contribute to the health care sector as follows. The amount of health facilities and their quality totally depends on the supply of the nurses, along with other medical equipment, staffing and premises facilities. The demand for nursing is projected from the demand of the health care facilities itself. Every year nurses flow into the workforce from other countries (i.e. immigrants), new graduates and some return to the profession after partial retirement or change of profession. On the other hand, the main proportion of nurses who leave this profession is either due to retirement, change of profession or emigration (Tomey & Marriner, 2009). Therefore, in order for the management to successfully intervene this problem, measures such as added remunerations, modification of recruitment methods and making availability of facilitated and comfortable working environment for the nurses should be taken. Such steps can help in cutting the number of early retirements from the workforce of registered nurses.

Measures of Availability of RNs

The demand and supply of nursing workforce in an organization vary with the facilities, packages, incentives and other policies offered. Different states have different legal requirements for recruitment of nurses and different trainings are required to satisfy them; such factors also act as an impediment and this discourages the application from the available nursing workforce. After identification of supply and demand of RNs, the management sets a benchmark for availability of nurses. The staffing or nurses is usually measured in densities, such as, number of nurses in a population of one million, this unit is used when calculations ...