affect of nursing shortage on nursing leadership and management, help!

[purpletouch]

i'm not really sure if this the right place to post this so sorry in advance.

I have a paper due next week on nursing leadership and management

we have to pick a topic and discuss how the topic we pick impacts or affects nursing leadership and management.

the topic i obviously picked is nursing shortage

so what i have so far in my outline is because of the shortage in nursing which are compounded and caused by:

- deficit in nursing program faculties are limiting the number of enrollments

- the rise in the elderly population calls for more nurses to provide health care

- increasing stress levels due to insufficient staffing causing more nurses to leave the workforce.

fewer nurses with leadership and management skills are being produced at the baccalaureate level.

and that's where my problem is. i can't think of anything else. i wanted to state another or probably two more reasons in my paper.

[PMFB-RN, RN]

I think the projections of the nursing shortage are to culminate in 2020

*** The nursing shortage was made up. It was/is a fabrication. False propaganda used to lure many people who would have not considered it otherwise into nursing and to extort tax payer money to expand/create nursing programs.

Never in the 18 years I have been in nursing has there been a shortage of nurses. I remember when the WI board of regulation and licensing and California BRN went online in (I think 1996). At that time I looked and there were enough licensed nurses in the states to fill every position in the sate 4 or 5 times over. Sure some of them were retired, some were travelers who lived in other states but still.

At the same time there were nurse opening everywhere. A new grad could walk into the specialty of their choice. An experienced nurses could walk out of one job on Friday and have another one by Monday. It wasn't a shortage of nurses, rather a shortage of nurses willing to work for the pay and benefits being offered while the economy was offering good jobs in other fields to nurses.

No there aren't nearly the jobs in the rest of the economy available and more nurses are coming back to / sticking with nursing. They have little choice.

At the time the hospital where screaming "NURSING SHORTAGE" as load and as often as they could. It wasn't true. We have an example of this when the California department of corrections health care was placed in federal receivership. One of the first things done by a federal judge was to drastically increase the pay for nurses. Overnight the openings in the department of correction nearly dried up. This at a time when hospitals couldn't hire a nurse to save their life, of course they were offering much less money that the department of corrections was.

[cdsga]

A little harsh for a blog thread I fear. This is informal-the instructor will do the correcting-help her out in more substantive ways.

[DoGoodThenGo]

Outside of some critical periods such as WWI and WWII, along with specific areas such as rural, there has never truly been a shortage of nurses. What happened is there was a shortage of nurses willing to put up with conditions on the ground, especially for the wages and benefits they were offered. So they married/had babies, found other work and so forth, anything to get out of nursing. Just as with everyone else, I can go to the NYS Office of the Professions in any given year and search up and down to find vast numbers of RNs one personally knew that hadn't worked as such in years if not decades.

Proof of this non-event nursing shortage happened when the recent credit/financial crisis and subsequent recession hit. Suddenly scores if not hundreds of experienced licensed RNs returned to work at the bedside or wherever they could. Sadly for new grads many have remained and have no intention of going anywhere anytime soon.

What ended the "nursing shortage" was back in the late 1980's and 1990's when hospitals finally began to address the root causes and took actions that increased the hiring and retention of nurses.

Caps had been on their way out anyway, but the remaining places largely got shot of them and the dress code about whites and such. Scrubs and such became the new "uniform". Hospitals also began revising policies that were more like nursing in the 1950's and began treating RNs like the professionals they were.

The largest change of course has been on the wage front, when even adjusted for inflation in many area's of the USA RNs are still doing vastly better than say the 1980's or 1990's.

[DoGoodThenGo]

Only "shortage" in nursing (if you could call it that) would be in the numbers of nurse educators, but that has more moving parts than just this supposed overall "nursing shortage".

ATM bedside nursing pays vastly more in many areas than teaching. Then there is what could be considered a "shortage" of masters or above nurses which are the qualifications most places require for nurse educators. The profession warned hospitals and such that this could happen back in the 1990's when during the managed care craze senior/experienced nurses were fired in droves for mainly no other reason than they were "expensive", having reached the top of their wage/benefit scales. It was from such ranks that many nurse educators were drawn.

Today's nurses going for their MSN or above are by and large looking to NP and not education.

[cdsga]

Very astute observation and one of those things that make you go HMMM... Administration and nursing does not ever seem to be on the same page. Especially when downsizing staff numbers in a knee-jerk reaction to keeping profits level. This has proven to be counterproductive and time will tell what the outcomes will be in patient care. I guess it all comes down to who can negotiate better.

[cdsga]

Wages have improved, but latest specs are that nursing wages have not kept up with inflation. I was working in the 80's and nothing more scary than finishing a shift and being told that there were no nurses to replace you. What happened? We ended up working doubles, coming back the next day and doing it all again. This was especially horrible in the ICU where you couldn't find suitably trained replacements. They floated med/surg nurses and LPN's to the unit, but the RN's had to give meds, adjust drips, notify doctors, etc. etc., etc. I don't ever want to go back to those days.

I agree with you that many shortages are manufactured and there may be shortages in certain areas where no one wants to work due to conditions, i.e., location/staff/patient ratios/responsibilities/management styles.