148,000 nurse practitioners will have to pick up the slack beginning in 2014, if the Supreme Court allows President Barack Obama’s healthcare law to add at least 30 million people to U.S. hospital, clinic, and doctors' practices already suffering a shortage of physicians. The nurses will likely see more referrals from local emergency rooms—mostly patients requiring follow-up care—as well as those with chronic conditions that need monitoring and those seeking treatment for the minor bumps, bruises, and sniffles of everyday life.
A nursing shortage in the U.S. that led to a decade-long push for new hires and graduates in the field is over, at least until 2020 when a glut of retirees will leave a new gap to fill, researchers said. 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 Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The increase in the nursing work force from 2005 to 2010 was the largest of any five-year period during the last 40 years, the authors said. Hospitals began experiencing a shortage of nurses in 1998, according to the American Hospital Association in 2002.
Hard figures are elusive, but the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth estimates a shortage of 18,000 nurses in the state by 2015—and the labor force is adapting. Oakland University in nearby Rochester, MI, has established a program specifically to retrain autoworkers in nursing—about 50 a year since 2009. And the College of Nursing at Wayne State University in Detroit is enrolling a wide range of people switching to health careers, including former manufacturing workers, said Barbara Redman, its dean. "They bring age, experience and discipline," she said.
The Minnesota Nurses Association, which made "safe staffing" its rallying cry during a one-day strike in 2010, is calling for legislation to set a limit on how many patients may be assigned to hospital nurses. At a press conference in St. Paul Tuesday, union leaders accused hospital officials of breaking promises made after the strike to work with nurses to address staffing questions. They also said they collected nearly 1,000 reports in the last half of 2011 from nurses who said patients were endangered by inadequate staffing levels. The new legislation, called the 2012 Staffing for Patient Safety Act, would set a maximum number of patients for each nurse, depending on the level of care required. Union officials were joined by two legislative supporters, Sen. Jeff Hayden, DFL-Minneapolis, and Rep. Larry Howes, R-Walker.
Nurse practitioners can help fill this gap. We are registered nurses with graduate school education and training to provide a wide range of both preventive and acute healthcare services. We're trained to provide complete physical exams, diagnose many problems, interpret lab results and X-rays, and prescribe and manage medications. In other words, we're fully prepared to provide excellent primary care. Moreover, there are plenty of us waiting to do just that. The most recent federal government statistics show there were nearly 160,000 of us in 2008, an increase of 12% over 2004, and our numbers continue to rise.
A Queens hospital has avoided a potentially disastrous strike after hammering out an 11th-hour deal with its nurses. Negotiations between staffers and Flushing Hospital Medical Center's sponsor, MediSys, came to a head last month when the nurses issued a 10-day strike warning after their health and pension benefits expired Dec. 31. Historically, management has issued temporary contract extensions throughout negotiations, though that courtesy was not extended to employees this time, union officials said. The walk out was set for Tuesday.