Fixing the Nursing Shortage

A new study by the National Foundation for American Policy says that there’s a critical nursing shortage in the United States, and that if the country doesn’t act soon, the American mortality rate could soar in coming years, BusinessWeek reports.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services predicts that, as baby boomers age and need more care, the United States could have a shortage of a million nurses by 2020, the reporter, Moira Herbst, writes.

“It’s simple: Not enough nurses means bad patient outcomes,” she quotes the executive director of NFAP, Stuart Anderson, as saying. “Nurses make a great difference in preventing infection, illness, and death, and public policy needs to ensure there are enough of them.”

The study, “Deadly Consequences: The Hidden Impact of America’s Nursing Shortage,” incorporates findings from other medical studies, Herbst writes, including …

one by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on surgery patients which found that increasing a nurse’s workload from four to eight patients could be accompanied by a 31-percent increase in patient mortality. The study concluded that “substantial decreases in mortality rates could result from increasing registered-nurse staffing, especially for patients who develop complications.”

So what can we do to alleviate the shortage?

The NFAP report recommends allowing more foreign nurses to work in the United States, but critics say that’s only a Band-Aid, not a permanent fix, Habst writes.

A better solution, they say, is the group’s other recommendation: Increase nursing-faculty salaries, so universities can recruit more nursing instructors, who might otherwise take higher-paying jobs in business, public health, or health-care administration, Habst writes. That way, nursing schools can train more nurses instead of turning away more than 100,000 applicants each year, as they do now, because they don’t have enough instructors to train them, she concludes.