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Summary: The Nursing Shortage

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After reviewing various literature regarding nursing shortages, there is a national problem. Huber speaks about the nursing shortages and discusses various contributors and strategies to fix the issues (2014). The various contributors would be nursing graduate numbers, aging nurses, and nursing recruitment/retention (Huber D. , 2014). There are currently not enough students graduating nursing school, this is due to limited faculty restricting enrollments, more push for bachelor prepared nurses, and minimal school budgets (Huber D. , 2014). For nurse’s demographics, Huber describes it as an aging population with more retiring and the median nursing age increasing (2014). This is described as the graying factor (Huber D. , 2014). Recruitment …show more content…

Nurses retiring will be a major contributor to shortages in the future and monetary incentives is not enough to increase the nursing population (Duvall & Andrews, 2010). There is a physical and mental demand on nurses that are affected, especially when increasing the workload (Duvall & Andrews, 2010). Attracting new nurses by changing the view of nursing as a career option is critical to gaining younger nurses (Duvall & Andrews, 2010). Addressing the stress of nurses, physical and mental, can help with patient outcome and with the public perception (Duvall & Andrews, …show more content…

Nurse practitioners are advanced practice registered nurses (APRN), thus by looking at the nursing shortages, one can assess the availability of APRN’s (Punke, 2017). Shortages are different in every state in the US, some states in the mid-region even have a predicted surplus of nurses (Punke, 2017). While using the data for individual states, leaders and school programs can assess how they can help with the national shortage (Punke, 2017). State’s also have their own definition on the scope of practice for nurse practitioners, thus limiting the full potential that they can offer (Punke, 2017). Additionally, schools are not adequately staffed to help increase the nursing population quick enough, thus rejecting many applications every year (Punke,

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