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...
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…
