The United States will be short more than 260,000 registered nurses by 2025 unless it expands nursing education capacity quickly and dramatically, according to a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“Expanding America’s Capacity to Educate Nurses” is part of an ongoing RWJF series focused on “Charting Nursing’s Future” in the United States. The report calls for new paradigms in healthcare policy that will address the approaching nursing shortage, which is driven by a quickly aging population.
The RWJF analysis is the outcome of 49 state-level coalitions that participated in national Nursing Education Capacity Summits in June 2008 and February 2009.
Summit participants recommended that nursing advocates develop strategic partnerships to create more effective advocacy for policy and regulatory change. Redesigning education and increasing faculty capacity and diversity were also high on the RWJF list.
One concept on the horizon may be a pay-for-performance plan for nursing schools. The report details such a program initiated by the Texas Workforce Shortage Coalition to double the number of nursing graduates in the state by 2013.
After a lobbying effort led by the Texas Association of Business, the state legislature appropriated almost $50 million for nursing schools, to be apportioned according to graduation rates. Nursing schools that failed to meet target percentages would have to return state money on a pro rata basis.
“The TAB’s bottom line for support was that funding had to be pay-for-performance, and there had to be accountability,” said Ron Luke, president of RPC Consulting and chairman of the TAB’s health policy committee.
Michigan has also created a forward-thinking approach to boosting nursing capacity, according to the report. The state created the office of the chief nurse executive in 2004 and established the Michigan Center for Nursing to collect and report workforce data.
“When legislators think about capacity, they think ‘seats’ in nursing schools, but seats alone don’t solve the problem,” said Jeanette Wrona Klemczak, Michigan’s first CNE. “There have to be programs and supports in place to assist students with timely completion of degrees.”
Since 2005, the state has produced 10,000 new nurses, 3,500 new clinical placements, 277 new clinical instructors and 150 new faculty-in-training. These results are due in part to increased funding for nursing education through a nurse licensure earmark.
“You can’t expect state legislators to give you money to expand nursing education capacity unless you can say, ‘Here’s what we know about the nursing workforce,’” said Mary Lou Brunell, executive director of the Florida Center for Nursing.
The report says generating reliable nursing workforce data is crucial to achieving policy objectives on the national level that would help prevent a nursing shortage. As advocated by the RWJF, these policies include the consolidation of federal funding for nursing education and workforce into state block grants and the creation of a federal nursing faculty corps.