I selected the issue regarding the shortage of nurses in hospitals and how it is affecting the quality of care. I chose to obtain my data and information about this issue from nursingsociety.org. This site contains facts about nursing shortage in North America and is run by the Honor Society of Nursing. I chose to use this site because it contains properly researched information in reports and articles about nursing.
A study by a Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI) board member, Mr. Peter Buerhaus published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2000. The report stated that the average age of registered nurses who were practicing increased by 4.5 years to 41.9 years in the period between 1983 and 1998 (nursingsociety.org, 2013). The report further projected that in a period of 10 years, more than 40% of all nurses registered in US would be more than 50 years of age. The supply of registered nurses is set to be 20% below the number of nurses required to serve the American population by 2020 (nursingsociety.org, 2013). In 2000, the US Department of Health carried out a survey dubbed The National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN). The survey revealed that the fewer people register as nurses each year since 1977. This means that nurses who retire, resign, die etc are not being replaced at an equal rate.
Nursing shortage lowers the quality of health care. In 2002, a study by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations reported that inadequate staffing was a contributing factor in 24% of all the 1609 cases that involved deaths, permanent loss of function or injury of patients since 1997. The report states that the US had a shortage 126, 000 back then. 90% of all long-term facilities didn’t have enough nurses to provide basic care. This puts patients in a precarious situation where they are bound to receive compromised healthcare services. shortage of nurses in US has led to the establishment of 50 “magnet hospitals” which have strived to overcome the shortage nursing shortages and other related challenges (nursingsociety.org, 2013). The federal government has also aided these hospitals to offer quality healthcare in spite of the nursing shortages.
The shortage of nurses has led to an increment of the salaries awarded to nurses in the country. Some organizations have come out to offer large sign-on bonuses in order to attract nurses to hospitals. The organizations are also advertising to significantly increase the salaries of nurses. The more the people who become nurses in the country, the more manageable will be the population: nurse ratios which lead to the improvement of healthcare quality in the country (Westphal, 2008). As a measure to encourage more people to train and work in the nursing profession a coalition of more than 40 national healthcare and nursing organizations have joined hands to address the nursing shortage. This is an advantage to the healthcare industry since the participating organizations can create relationships that lead to joint and higher quality research into problematic areas in healthcare (Curtin, 2002). As such the quality of healthcare is bound to increase. The creation and substantial funding of sustainable campaigns such as Campaign for Nursing’s Future also assures the American populace better healthcare.
References
http://www.nursingsociety.org/Media/Pages/shortage.aspx
Curtin, (2002) “An Integrated Analysis: and J. Needleman et al., “Nurse-Staffing Levels and the Quality of Care in Hospitals. New England Journal of Medicine 346, no. 22: 1715–1722.
Westphal, J. A. (2008). The effect of workforce shortages on nurse leader turnover and succession in United States hospitals.
