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Nursing Nurses And The Nursing Shortage

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ABSTRACT Nursing is one of the largest groups of healthcare providers giving high quality direct care in hospitals, nursing homes, clinics and in home care. Due to vast reductions in nursing students, coupled with other challenges presented by a growing nursing shortage, this has resulted in fewer nurses working longer hours and caring for even sicker patients than before. This set of circumstances compromises the care of the patient and contributes to the nursing shortage by creating an environment that drives nurses from the bedside and into other professions or out of nursing, due to being burnout. Nurses are a peculiar group of people in a profession that has several different fields and has roles for different…show more content…
Nursing shortages are appearing to be a global concern as well. The shortage of nurses has caused a widespread and dangerous deficiency of experienced nurses who are needed to care for individual patients as well as the population as a whole. According to an article written by Littlejohn (2012) the nursing shortage needs appropriate intervention in order to prevent a serious public health crisis. Nursing is one of the largest groups of healthcare professionals whose has over 3.1 million Registered Nurses, but there are still not enough to care for the growing number of patients. AMN (2012) Study by Hecker (2004) suggested that in the year 2012 there would be a deficit of more than one million nurses. The shortage of nurses has put the patient as well as nurses at an increased risk for injury. There are several causes for nursing shortages. Shortages are caused by sudden population growth resulting in a growing need for health care services. There are also, a declining amount of new students in nursing. According to American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), nursing schools in the United States turned away almost 80,000 applicants in 2012 due to insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, and classroom space. AACN (2014) Baby boomers are getting older. According to the American Nurses Association (ANA), over a 10 year span, the average age of employed Registered Nurses has increased from 42.7 years in 2000 to 44.6
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