The current and growing shortage of nurses is posing a real threat to the ability of hospitals, long-term care facilities, and others to provide timely access to quality care. Nurse staffing shortages and nurse turn-over contributes to the growing reduction in the number of staffed patient beds available for services, increasing costs, and rising concerns about the quality of care. Health care organizations highly depend on nurse managers and leaders to reverse this trend. This paper discusses the reasons for nursing shortage and turn-over, different approaches to solve this issue, and my personal philosophy about this issue.
Nursing Shortage and Nurse Turn-Over
Nursing shortage is one of the major issues in the health care organizations in United States and that results in decreased patient outcome and poor patient satisfaction. One of the main reasons for nursing shortage is aging work force. Nurses are the largest group of health care professionals in America, but majority of the nurses are close to retirement age. The nursing profession was very popular in 1960’s and 1970’s but currently there are different career opportunities available for women (Nevidjon & Erickson, 2001). These newly presented career opportunities have an adverse impact on new nursing candidates. Another reason for the nursing shortage is the lack of nursing school faculties and there are many nursing faculties that do not have proper classroom, clinical sites, and preceptors. Nursing is a very tough job both physically and mentally because of stressful work environment and that can lead to nursing burnout. Nurses are very unhappy with their workplace because of poor management, excessive workload, and abuse from patients or patient’s family. According to Dr. Linda Aiken (as cited in Nevidjon & Erickson, 2001), nurses are dissatisfied with their workload which affects the patient safety. The nursing shortage mainly affects