Nursing Workforce Crisis and Initiatives

The health care sector comprises of different professionals with different educational qualifications and work in various settings. Nurses account for a significant portion of the entire health care workforce given their role in coordinating patient care activities. Actually, nurses are regarded as the primary professionals who provide health care services to different patient populations. Despite the significance of nurses in the health care workforce, nursing is experiencing a crisis in relation to the shortage of nurses, which has become a major issue for policymakers in the health sector. The shortage of nurses has increased at a time when there is an increased need for delivery of high quality patient care in order to enhance patient outcomes. This increase in nursing shortage has in turn contributed to the development of various nursing workforce initiatives that are geared towards addressing this problem.

The Nursing Workforce Crisis
The modern health care sector is facing a nursing workforce crisis because of the increased shortage of nurses at a time when demand for their services has significantly increased. The nursing workforce crisis is brought by the challenges experienced in training, recruiting, and retaining nurses. These challenges contribute to a shortage of these professionals while demand for high quality health care services continues to increase. While there have been several initiatives at the local, state, and federal level to address the nursing workforce crisis, most of these initiatives have failed to address the issue in an effective manner. According to the National League for Nursing (2017), the nursing shortage continues to outpace Congressional resources allocated to help deal with it. Consequently, federal resources allocated to the nursing workforce are inadequate to achieve the desired human resource development and in turn resolve the issue of nursing shortage.
The nursing workforce crisis is in turn generates several challenges in the health sector with regards to the delivery of high-quality patient care services and improving patient outcomes. Some of the results of the persistent nursing workforce crisis include health inequalities, poor health outcomes, and inflated costs of patient care services (National League for Nursing, 2017). Stechmiller (2002) states that the nursing shortage has generated numerous challenges for health care facilities and professionals to provide high-quality, safe care to acute and critically ill patients. Therefore, the ability of the health sector to achieve its desired goals with regards to health promotion and disease prevention is inhibited by the nursing workforce crisis.
Initiatives to Address the Nursing Workforce Crisis
Given the prevalence of the nursing workforce crisis and its devastating impacts on the health sector, there is an urgent need to enhance supply of the nursing workforce. This need is exacerbated by the fact that the nursing workforce crisis threatens the quality of patient care and outcomes. However, nursing workforce initiatives are relatively complex since the nursing shortage is multi-faceted in nature and requires the establishment of comprehensive solutions that improve supply of nursing professionals. Since the problem of nursing shortage was first recognized in 1965, there is lack of a feasible plan to effectively fix this problem (Orbis Education, 2016).
One of the nursing workforce initiatives that have been undertaken over the past few years is enacting health care policies that are targeted towards enhancing the recruitment and retention of nurses. State and federal governments have enacted health care policies to promote the recruitment and retention of nurses as part of health reform initiatives that are geared toward addressing the nursing workforce crisis. During this process, policymakers work with various stakeholders to ensure that the health policies will help create a conducive environment for increasing the supply of nurses.
Apart from legislative initiatives, nursing residency programs have been established to deal with the problem of nursing shortage. The programs are considered crucial in addressing the nursing workforce crisis since they help in transitioning new nurses from the educational environment to actual practice (Zinn et al., 2012). Nurse residency programs also provide a framework through which nurses continue to develop their skills and deliver high-quality patient care. In this regard, nurse residency programs help in promoting recruitment and retention of new nurses to deal with the persistent problem of nursing shortage. The main objective of establishing nurse residency programs is to lessen turnover and ensure that new nurses have adequate resources and are well-prepared for success in their careers.
The other nursing workforce initiatives that have been adopted in the modern health care sector include competitive pay, flexible work schedules for nurses, and initiatives that are geared towards enhancing the attractiveness of nursing education. Competitive pay and flexible work schedules for nurses are considered as an important approach towards enhancing the retention of these professionals. On the other hand, enhancing the attractiveness of nursing education is seen as an important way for increasing the supply of nurses and promoting recruitment.
Recommendations for Improvement
While these nursing workforce initiatives have helped address the problem, there is need for improvement since they have failed to deal with the nursing shortage in an effective manner. As a result, various suggestions have been made on what needs to be done to improve the situation by increasing the nursing workforce. One of these recommendations is changing the way nursing students are recruited and educated. According to Orbis Education (2016), one of the serious interventions in the nursing industry to deal with the nursing workforce crisis is to change the recruitment and education of nursing students. Such interventions would help bridge the gap between nursing education and nursing practice, which is one of the root causes of the nursing workforce crisis. In this regard, the nursing industry should develop and utilize innovative academic-practice partnerships between various stakeholders such as health care providers, nursing schools, and third-party nurse managers (Orbis Education, 2016). This will help nursing schools increase the capacity of their programs to generate well-prepared, adequately-trained, and practice-ready nurses.
Secondly, the nursing workforce crisis can be resolved through collaborative partnerships between nurse educators and employers since currently educators and employers operate autonomously. Collaborations between these two important stakeholders will help create productive opportunities that contribute to an increase in nurses. The other measure that could address the nursing workforce crisis is changing the skill mix so that some of the trainings undertaken by nurses are undertaken by other healthcare professionals to help lessen the pressure on nurses. However, the implementation of such an initiative requires conducting an in-depth evaluation of the existing competencies and skills. This would help eliminate any potential risks of changing the skill mix and improve its effectiveness in addressing the nursing shortage.
In conclusion, nursing shortage has emerged as one of the major issues in the health care sector because of its increase at a time when there is an increased need for high-quality health care services and more demands from different patient population. Given its prevalence and impact on the delivery of appropriate patient care, various initiatives have been undertaken by relevant stakeholders. However, most of the current initiatives have failed to deal with the problem in an effective manner. Some of the recommendations for dealing with this problem include changing the skill mix, collaborative partnerships, and changing recruitment strategies.
References
National League for Nursing. (2017). Workforce. Retrieved September 30, 2017, from http://www.nln.org/advocacy-public-policy/legislative-issues/workforce
Orbis Education. (2016, June). Tackling the Nursing Shortage – Health Care Report. Retrieved September 30, 2017, from http://orbiseducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Orbis-Education-Health-Care-White-Paper-Nursing-Shortage.pdf
Stechmiller, J.K. (2002). The Nursing Shortage in Acute and Critical Care Settings. AACN Advanced Critical Care, 13(4), 577-584.
Zinn, J. L. (2012). Addressing the Nursing Shortage: The Need for Nurse Residency Programs. AORN Journal, 96(6), 652 - 657.