The Dallas Morning News September 25, 2002, Wednesday

Nurse shortage to get much worse, report says

 By Victor Godinez

 

DALLAS _ A new federal report on the nursing shortage says the situation is about to get a lot worse.

The Bureau of Health Professions predicts a shortage of 6 percent for 2000, 2001 and 2002.

The shortage, the report says, will reach 10 percent by 2008, 20 percent by 2015 and 29 percent by 2020. In other words, the shortage will be almost five times worse in 2020 than it is now. As alarming as those numbers sound, experts caution that the shortfall is not inevitable.

"If health care providers get out there and start promoting the profession, I think there is a lot that can be done to turn this around in fewer than 20 years," said Pam Cohn, recruitment manager in human resources for Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas. "Also, today's economy is making health care look like a lot more attractive a profession."

The Bureau of Health Professions _ a division of the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services _ calculated the shortage by measuring supply and demand numbers. The full survey _ "Projected Supply, Demand, and Shortages of Registered Nurses: 2000-2020" _ is available at bhpr.hrsa.gov/healthworkforce/rnproject/.

On the supply side, the report notes that the total number of registered nurses coming out of associate degree programs, baccalaureate programs and hospital-based diploma programs shrank from 96,610 in 1995 to 71,475 in 2000. It projects that the trend is not likely to reverse on its own.

With fewer graduates entering the field, the average age of nurses has shot up. In 1980, 25 percent of nurses were under 30. In 2000, 9 percent of nurses were that young. The biggest portion of nurses _ a little less than 18 percent _ are now in their mid-40s, the report found, meaning that more nurses are closer to retirement than ever before.

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Roughly 50 million people will be added to the population through 2020, an 18 percent jump, the survey says. While all those people will need nursing care to some degree, the bulk of the demand boom will come from the elderly population _ those 65 and over _ which will grow by 19 million, or 54 percent, through 2020. The elderly typically spend three times as much on health care as the rest of the population.

So if the trends continue, there will be slightly more than 2 million registered nurses working by 2020, but there will be a need for more than 2.8 million.

Dr. Denise Geolot, director of the division of nursing at the Bureau of Health Professions, said hospitals and other nurse employers need to think about how they're going to change the trend.

"I think one of the things we have to address is the image of nursing and lack of respect that nurses experience," she said. "We also need to increase the pipeline that is going into nursing. And we have to focus on retention strategies."

Cohn at Presbyterian agreed. Her hospital already has several outreach programs at local schools to educate students about nursing, offers tuition reimbursement to nurse graduates and emphasizes to nurses that they can work in a variety of departments and advance their careers.

"It's not just taking temperatures and blood pressures," she said. "They're at the table in decision-making."

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