Grants Awarded to Combat Nursing Shortage

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Grants awarded to combat nursing shortage
Nurse and patient safety
Coalition: Ending nurse shortage is crucial to healthcare reforms
Conclusion
References

Introduction

There has been a growing concern about the shortage of nurses in the country. It is estimated that by the year 2020, the United States will be requiring 2.8 million nurses; while the current system can only provide 1.8million by that time. Many suggestions have been put forward to explain this shortage and to offer solutions for the shortage.

In this paper, we are going to review three articles that try to define this problem and to offer some solutions for it.

Grants awarded to combat nursing shortage

This article details the resources being allocated in order to address the issue of shortage of nurses in the hospitals. The resources are in form of grant awarded to the Northwest Health Foundation by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The resources are allocated to cover various sector with the aim of alleviating the chronic shortage of nurses; these areas include; the increase of the number of BSN nurses in new York and Carolina, funding of the immigrant nurses program in san Francisco, training of nurses in gerontology in Tacoma and the financial support of the Clinical Scene Investigator Academy in Kansas.

Other projects that would benefit from the grant include a project to bridge the management gap between the nursing schools and the health providers in San Antonio, support of nursing schools in Oregon, Pacific Islands, southwestern Washington and western Texas.

The bulk of the grants will therefore go into improving the capacity of the nursing workforce by allowing more nurses to graduate from nursing schools and to facilitate their smooth entry into the job market. It also encourages the immigration of qualified and skilled nurses to the United States to cover the existing gap.

Nurse and patient safety

This article takes a different view on the causes of nursing shortage in America; the author attributes part of the shortage to the vast amount of time that nurses spend doing work that is not primary patient care; the average nurse spends only about 20 to 30% of the time performing direct patient care; the rest of the time is spent carrying out administrative duties and completing paperwork. This not only make work at the hospital to be very inefficient, but it also puts the patients at risk due to the little time and attention accorded to them. The author also blamed the poor allocation of nursing resources thus increasing the complexity of the work; finally, educational systems that produce nurses that are not prepared for the rapidly changing sector of healthcare provision due to the use of outdated curricula.

The author suggest modalities of removing these wastages of time as a method of reducing the shortage of nurses; and increasing the contact between the nurse and the patient for optimum patient safety.

The way to achieve this is to directly engage the nurse so that they can come up with their own solutions to the bottleneck they see in the system that is making their work less efficient; the ideas are then vetted and possibly approved. This if followed by the testing of the idea on a small scale; if it works, then it can be applied to the whole hospital.

Coalition: Ending nurse shortage is crucial to healthcare reforms

There are many issues that are ailing the healthcare sector in the United States, the nursing shortage is jus one of them, but is a major issues. Therefore, in-order to achieve an efficient and successful healthcare program in the country, the author recognizes that reforms are essential.

It is in this same spirit that the president of the United States, Barack Obama allocated $500 million to fund training of primary doctors and nurses. A further $300 million will go into funding the National Health Service Corps activities, thus effectively increasing their financial resources two fold.

Another prong of attack was also revealed by the Champion nursing coalition whose main aim is to enlighten the public on issues surrounding the shortage of nurses in the American healthcare system. The education will cover issues of quality of services, accessibility and cost implications as pertaining the shortage of nurses.

The education of the public will also be accompanied by similar endeavors among the policy makers; this will seek to secure more funding of nursing schools to improve both their capacity and their ability to stay relevant so that they can produce nurses that are competent and able to adapt quickly to the fast changing world of healthcare provision.

This article gives a two pronged attack to the shortage of nurses; one of education and lobbying to bring to the forefront the plight of the nursing fraternity in regards to their shortage; and secondly to increase the capacity of nursing schools so as to produce more and better nurses for the future.

Conclusion

The issue of shortage of nurses is a complex one and there is no silver bullet that will lay it to rest. The only thing that can work is committed and persistent efforts to improve the situation over a long time. This should also incorporate all the stakeholders of the health provisions sector so that at the end of the day, no one will feel left out of the reforms program.

References

AHA News (2007): Coalition: ending nurse shortage is crucial to healthcare reforms. Pg 7.

Mullett S.[Editor] (2008):Grants awarded to combat nursing shortage:RN October 2008;Professional update pg 14.

Runy L. A. (Not dated): Optimizing your nursing staff’s time at the bedside is the key to better safety: Nurse and patient safety; Special supplement.

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