Scarce resources in nursing: leadership succession and generational preferences

Scarce Resources

Nursing shortage basically means the demand for nursing professionals exceeds the professional nurses, this can be in a given healthcare facility, nationally or globally. This can be measured through the number of job openings demanding high number of nurses than the ones who are available or even the disproportionate ration between qualified nurses practicing and population. This is a rampant challenge in both developing and developed countries all over the world. From the Second World War, hospitals in the U.S. have had to deal with a cyclical shortage of nurses. The national supply of nurses cannot meet the high demand nationally. With this recurrent shortage in nurses in the U.S. means that the quality of patient care will by and large continue declinig. This is a complex issue that is multifaceted and the causes are very many.

The shortage that has been observed recently is due to multiple cumulative factors and includes the steep population growth that has been observed recently. This means that the number of people in need of care from nurses is increasing at an alarming rate but the number of nurses is not increasing in tandem to meet the high population demands.

The other cause of the shortage is a continuing diminishing number of new students who enroll into nursing. This means that the inflow of new nurses into the healthcare industry to replace the retiring nurses is incongruent.

A decline in the RN earning which is relative to other careers that are available is yet another reason. Nurses opt to switch to other careers that attract better pay and hence leave gaps in hospitals.

An aging workforce is also another reason, just like other careers the nursing profession is affected by the aging population meaning that nurses continue to retire and with no fresh graduates to take up the positions of these retired nurses translates to an inevitable shortage.

Another factor is the fact that there is an overall rise in the aging population which requires a lot of healthcare services. This calls for great attention and in most cases even personal nurses for each aged person hence the patient-nurse ration has to be balanced. All these issues above are happening in the face of an expanding need for the healthcare giver bearing the recently launched healthcare reforms and a massive retirement of nurses leaving a massive deficit in the industry as a whole (KaiserEDU.org, 2012).

The nurses shortage is serious and needs to be looked into urgently. The magnitude of the shortage can be seen for instance in 2002, it was estimated that the shortage of nurses was 125,000 which can be translated to 65% of the full-time equivalence required. This shortage is expected to go higher by 2020 ranging between 400,000-808,000 due to the fact that there is a limited entry of new nurses into the profession. According to reports by American Health Care Association that was released in July 2008 shows that there are more than 19,400 opportunities in the nursing industry and at the same time additional 116,000 positions were open in 2007 according to the same association. This means that the total opportunities were 135,000, an approximate vacancy of 8.15%. This is a very high percentage meaning that the healthcare industry is seriously in need of nurses. It is also speculated that there are over 900,000 nurses that are aged above 50 years and are on their way to retirement, which means that a huge gap will be left with these nurses upon their retirement.

This means that the issue of nursing shortage has to be looked at and if not, it means that there will be a negative impact on the patient care outcomes and levels which will eventually contribute to lethal errors in the medical field. Furthermore a lower-nurse patient ratio that is in the surgical and medical teams means that there will be low mortality of patients. Therefore if the nursing shortage is not looked into it means that the patient mortality rate will go up and at the same time the low rates of nurse's retention will lead to patient deaths that can be prevented.

Therefore there are strategies that can be implemented so as to deal with this issue; solutions should focus on increasing wages and recruitment of the nurses even if it means outsourcing from other countries such as Canada, Great Britain, India, African countries and so on. Focus should be on retaining the nurses who are currently in job positions and encouraging the people who left the nursing career to get back. The primary retention strategies are the improvement of their working conditions and enhance education and professional development (KaiserEDU.org, 2012).