Introduction
The nursing shortage continues to get larger. With the lack of nursing instructors and nurses retiring as well as nurses changing professions, the numbers are more dismal every year. There is the expectation that there will be more than 400,000 vacant nursing positions in the next 10 years. This shortage is present all over the world. There are few countries that presently have the nurses that they need. This paper will discuss nurse retention and hiring of foreign nurses to fill the gaps.
Approaches to solving the nursing shortage
It appears from the research (Ulrich, 2003), that the answer is simple yet very complicated. 7,600 nurses were interviewed in an attempt to determine what they thought were the solutions to the nursing shortage. 87% of those nurses said that the nursing shortage itself creates so much stress on the job that they are thinking of getting out of nursing. They feel that this allows them to little time with their patients which affects the quality of the patient’s care. Nurses felt that the things that would solve the nursing shortage consisted of, improved working environments, improved wages and benefits, higher status of the nurses in the hospital environment, better hours, financial aid with education bills, increased capacity to train and educate, programs to help people enter nursing and more available support staff (Ulrich, 2003).
The solutions that these nurses came up with included pre-nursing school. This would be an effort to bring the hero’s of nursing to elementary and middle school students, with this would come influencers which are people that would help these students choose nursing over other professions. There needs to be more faculty positions and the faculty salaries need to be increased. They also need to put nurses with advanced degrees but who also have good industry experience in the classroom to encourage nurses. There needs to be better collaboration between the nursing schools and the facilities so nurses can be educated in such a way to better prepare them for when they become nurses. It is felt that many nurses are lost because they do not understand what it is they will be doing. Lastly, they felt there needed to be better support upon entry into practice.
Recruitment of Foreign Nurses
This is a very controversial issue at this time. We do have a nursing shortage but so does everyone. Is it then fair to recruit nurses from other countries to work in ours instead of solving our nursing recruitment and retention issues? For years this country has recruited from Canada, Philippines, Africa, Asia and other countries as well. Africa at this time is so short of nurses that they are not able to keep hospitals open. In some places where they need 1500 nurses, there are only 500. This is devastating to their healthcare system and it reflects what is happening in many countries (Reilly, 2003).
On the surface of the problem, it benefits our hospitals greatly. However, every nurse that immigrates here, causes another shortage in her own country. In some countries like Africa for instance that shortage causes such a devastation to the health care system that the spread of disease and infection could then affect our country. (Fraleigh, 2008). We who have the money and the means need to attempt to solve our own nursing shortage. As stated earlier, even our nurses know what is wrong, yet we cannot come to agreement and solve the problems.
There is dishonesty in much of the recruiting that is happening at this time also (Reilly, 2003) as recruiters are paying countries bonus to allow their nurses out of country faster and telling nurses that their salaries will be quite high only to find that once they get here they are not always that high, nor are they treated with the respect they would have received in their own country.
Conclusion
The nursing shortage continues to increase and because of it, we all fear the worst. However, there are ways to recruit and retain nurses but those take time and effort that too many is better spent recruiting foreign nurses. However, we do not solve the issue this way. We only gloss it over a short time like smoke in mirrors. We must solve our own issue, we have know about it for 25 years (Reilly, 2003) and yet we only now begin to panic.
References
Fraleigh J. (2008). What would be the effect of recruiting foreign nurses? RN.
Reilly P, (2003). Importing controversy: US hospitals recruitment of foreign nurses. Modern Healthcare 33(13).
Ulrich, B.(2003). The nursing shortage and potential solutions. Nephrology Nursing Journal. 20(4).