Despite rampant claims of a critical nursing shortage, many cities and states in the US are actually suffering from the opposite problem: a surplus of nurses. The intended purpose of this article is to challenge the widespread belief that a current nursing shortage exists.
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I am assured that some of you are reading this and saying to yourselves, "Duh! This topic is old hat. We already know there's a glut of nurses in many parts of the country, so why are you writing about this?"
Here is my reason for writing about the current surplus of nurses in local employment markets. I entered the term 'nursing shortage' into a popular search engine and yielded nearly 720,000 results. Afterward, I searched for the phrase 'no nursing shortage' using the same search engine and received about 59,000 results. Since the loud warnings of a dire nursing shortage are being hollered everywhere, I am going to do my part and shout some information that contradicts these claims.
Hospitals began experiencing a shortage of nurses in 1998, according to the American Hospital Association in 2002 (Ostrow, 2012). Colleges and universities aggressively responded to this shortage by expanding their existing nursing programs and/or starting new schools of nursing. Johnson & Johnson started an ad campaign to entice more people into the profession. Healthcare facilities responded to the shortage by offering more perks such as tuition reimbursement and scholarships to current employees.
Well, those efforts to increase the total number of nurses in the US have been wildly successful. The number of full-time nurses grew by about 386,000 from 2005 to 2010 and about a third of the growth occurred as unemployment rose to a high of 10 percent during that period, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine (Ostrow, 2012). But still, the study raises an intriguing question: How did the nation go from a shortage to, if not a surplus, then at least an apparently adequate supply of nurses? (Rovner, 2011).
The federal government helped by increasing the funding for nursing programs to a whopping $240 million, up from $80 million in 2001. The proliferation of accelerated bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) degree programs and direct-entry master of science in nursing (MSN) degree programs also contributed to the rapid increase in the number of new nurses because students who hold non-nursing degrees can complete these training programs in 12 to 18 months.
The slumping economic situation in the US also contributed to the easing of the nursing shortage. Seasoned nurses are not retiring because many saw their retirement funds dwindle during the economic crisis of 2008. Other nurses have become breadwinners and accepted full-time positions once their spouses were laid off during the Great Recession. Some nurses are coming out of retirement and reactivating their nursing licenses. Moreover, masses of people lost health insurance benefits after becoming unemployed, which leads to reduced patient census in places that provide nursing care.
Thirty-six percent of nursing graduates in the class of 2011 had not secured positions as registered nurses (RNs) as of last fall, according to a survey conducted by the National Student Nurses' Association in September (Griswold, 2012). Of course, some states are afflicted with a worse glut of nurses than others. More than four out of ten (43 percent) of California nurses, who were newly licensed as registered nurses in the previous 18 months, say they could not find a job, according to a recent survey paid for by the California Institute for Nursing & Health Care (CVBT, 2012).
Experts predict that a nursing shortage will peak in the US in 2020. While these projections may turn out to be accurate, keep in mind that this country is continually producing record numbers of new nurses each year. Still, the nursing shortage of the late 1990s appears to have eased.
