Nursing Shortage

National reports estimate a national nursing shortage of up to 1 MILLION nurses in the next 10-15 years. This shortage, if not addressed, will potentially cripple our healthcare system. There are many factors that are converging to create this shortfall to include:

• Aging nursing workforce set to enter retirement
• Aging nurse faculty limiting nursing school enrollments
• Aging population who will require not only more care, but much more complex care in the next 10 years
• Increased professional opportunities for what has been predominately a female profession• Retention issue for staff nurses

Locally, there are nearly 20,000 registered, licensed practical nurses and nursing aides, orderlies and attendants employed in the metropolitan area. However, local hospitals report at 9.4% vacancy rate and a turnover rate of 13%. These vacancies and turnovers of nurses cost thousands of dollars to health care systems that are already struggling with shrinking operational budgets.

Tried and True Solutions
In the past 15 years there have been enormous improvements in removing barriers to increase the number of nursing students in the education ‘pipeline’. The Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City and the REACH Healthcare Foundation have been leaders in helping regional schools of nursing by funding pilot projects that address student retention and diversity of students and faculty. But pipeline solutions are just part of the answer to these very complex issues.

Harnessing Innovation: The New Frontier
The Bi-State Nursing Workforce Innovation Center will engage in the next level of work with the region’s healthcare industry to rethink the problem. It is estimated that nurses spend 20-40% of their time on responsibilities other than patient care such as hunting for equipment, tracking down results, and entering information in multiple places.

Our Center believes there will never be enough nurses if we continue to tweak a system that is unsustainable. For us to successfully meet our challenges, we must change the way nurses work. No one knows the problems better than the staff nurses themselves, therefore the Center will support nurses in unit-based change initiatives to improve patient care and safety.

The second biggest opportunity in addressing the nursing shortage is to stem the flow of nurses who leave practice shortly after they begin working. Nurses report feeling burned out, dissatisfied with their working conditions, and nursing not meeting their professional expectations. Many of these issues can be addressed within the organization, but it takes good system diagnostics to uncover the area that has the greatest opportunity to improve the nurses’ work environment.