Nursing Job World

According to New York (CNNMoney.com) there is an escalating problem in America - due to the possibility of the nursing shortage becoming worse as the so-called Baby Boomers are growing older and older, they demand more care and assistance from professional nurses. This will definitely give more stress and much pressure on the US nursing system.

Peter Buerhaus, a workforce analyst at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing in Nashville, Tennessee stated that “America has had a nursing shortage for years and that the country will be facing a shortfall of 260,000 RNs”.

Buerhaus also stated: “In a few short years, just under four out of 10 nurses will be over the age of 50,” and “They’ll be retiring out in a decade. And we’re not replacing these nurses even as the demand for them will be growing.”

That is due to fact that nursing schools are already filled to the brim.

According to experts, there will be a nurse shortage even if nursing schools worked to their limits because there have been a rise of people interested in getting into the nursing profession especially those who were affected by recession that started in 2007.

Actually the recession had positive impact on the nursing profession since it attracted more registered nurses to join or comeback due to financial reasons. It also encouraged new sign ups in nursing schools and postponed retirements for veteran nurses.

Despite the rise of people who are interested in serving in the nursing industry, still the availability of qualified and well trained nurses is scarce due to the lack of nursing instructors in schools to accommodate the rise of students. Some even take years of waiting just to get into a nursing course.

The difficulty of nursing schools retaining their instructors is due to the fact that nurses earn way more when they work in hospitals than in learning institutions. So this factor would really drive them to prefer a hospital duty than teaching.

According to American Nurses Association, RNs earn around $56,000 or may go up to as much as $90,000 for really hard working and ambitious nurses that would go for long hours work including night shifts, weekends and some even holidays, in big city hospitals.

There is a need to provide attractive salaries for nurses who choose to work in schools and teach to be able to cater to the huge number of enrollees.

Now for the meantime it is still an option for the US to accommodate foreign workers to bridge the gap while the nursing schools work on training more qualified registered nurses. Well, it’s not about foreign workers taking over American jobs but it’s more on providing the need of society especially in the health care sector.

(Based on a news in CNNMoney.com)

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 24th, 2010 at 12:25 am and is filed under Nursing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.