Nurses working together to improve care and increase and expand our workforce.

摘要

Regardless of your opinion (or mine) about how bad the nursing shortage is now or how bad it will be in the near future, the nation is currently short 116,000 nurses, and this is predicted to worsen to 500,000 by 2025. Today 3 million registered nurses play a central role in U.S. health care, affecting lives with regard to disease prevention and management, improving clinical outcomes, and facilitating comfort care at the end of life. More than 2.6 million workers, including nurses, nurse's aids, home health aids, and other health care workers, provided long-term health care in 2007, up 21% since 2002. The need for additional long-term care workers is expected to rise by another 27% percent by 2016. The demand for long-term care workers is anticipated to grow as the 78 million baby boomers age. According to the AARP Public Policy Institute, approximately 69% of people aged 65 or older today will require some sort of long-term care, with an average duration of 3 years over their lifetime. It is clear, therefore, that there is an increased need for nurses at all levels. The consumer demands and expectations of these providers also continue to expand. This can be extremely challenging for nurses who went to nursing school more than 10 years ago. They are expected to remain current with regard to medical management, pharmacother-apy, and nursing interventions and may not have the opportunities to access new information in a timely fashion. Moreover, the issues around health care policy, scope of practice, and what can be done in different types of health care settings changes and evolves. Thus we have a workforce issue as well as challenges to maintain and grow a workforce that has exemplary clinical skills and knowledge to provide care for an increasingly well-educated older population-us, the aging baby boomers!