The Nursing Shortage

The Nursing Shortage

Introduction

Registered Nurses are the largest group of healthcare professionals in any country that work for the betterment and well being of humanity. Currently the interest of people to enter the healthcare profession is decreasing day by day. Due to the lack of interest in this noble profession the shortage of nurses is being observed these days. The shortage of registered nurses seems to be further increased in the coming few years. Research shows that the storage of registered nurses will increase by 2020 (Egenes, 2012). The requirement for the nurses will increase due to the aging of the baby boom generation. These changes and increasing demand of nurses will be more costly and difficult to address this issue in the future.

In order to further evaluate the problem of shortage of nurses it is important to understand the definition of the shortage of nurses in the current scenario. Buchan and Aiken define the shortage of the nurses as uncertain and unfavorable working condition for nurses these days. The shortage of nurses can also be defined on the scale of relative and absolute perspective. Absolute shortage focuses that there is a deficiency of skilled people to work for the profession of the nursing where as relative shortage can be defined as that there are skilled people available, but they do not meet the other employment criteria to work with in this profession (Buchan, et.al, 2008).

In order to understand the nursing shortage issue one must understand how this problem is developing and what the reasons behind their development are. The nursing shortage issue is increasing rapidly because there is no balance between the supply and demand of nurses. The nurses being graduated and registered is less than the requirement of nurses in the healthcare sector in United States and other countries. These days supply of nurses is less than the demand of the society (Egenes, 2012). The reasons behinds the increasing demand and decreasing supply are the unfavorable work conditions, and the lack of interest of students in this profession. In this paper, the different reasons behind the shortage of nurses are discussed and apart from that few solutions are also proposed to overcome this issue.

Discussion

Shortage Reasons

There are different reasons due to which the shortage of Nurses is increasing these days. The reasons include working environment, increasing population, the healthcare settings and women's employment settings. In this paper, we will focus over the few major reasons that lead to the shortage of nurses.

Increasing Population

The demand of the registered nursing is increasing as a result of population aging. The research shows that up till 2020 the population will increase by 18 percent which directs how rapidly the population is increasing. Increasing population also increases the demand for the health care settings that increases the needs of the registered nurses. The research conducted over the increasing population also shows that up till 2020 the population of aged people i.e. the people older than 65 years will increase 54 ...