Not Enough Nurses

While patients know the care and comfort provided by good nurses can be priceless, recent studies have tried to estimate their real economic value. For instance, an American Medical Association study found that programs that paired Medicare patients with nurses for monthly one-on-one meetings improved patients’ health and cut down on costly hospital visits. Another study published in the journal Medical Care calculated that adding some 133,000 nurses to acute care hospital settings could save nearly 6,000 lives every year and amount to more than $6 billion in medical savings. Against these findings, it may be no wonder that a recent survey found that 9 out of 10 Americans want lawmakers to be sure nurses are included in any plans to reform health care—nurses’ long-term health could be critical to our own.

While nurses may earn more popularity points than others in the medical world, they haven’t always gotten the props they deserve. “For a long time, nurses were viewed as handmaidens of the physician,” says Sandra Edwardson, a professor at the U of M’s School of Nursing and director of the Doctor of Nursing Practice program. (That’s right— doctor of nursing.) Yet the shift from helpmate to highly trained practitioner got an early start in Minnesota when Dr. Richard Olding Beard persuaded the state legislature and the university to create a nursing school on campus, starting with just eight students in 1909. The school is now the nation’s longest continuously running university-based nursing school, and it’s the largest graduate program at the U of M. It operates eight Centers for Excellence and offers five degree programs on two campuses.

The school’s steady expansion has been fueled, in part, by a nurse shortage that began more than a decade ago. Though many previously trained nurses have since returned to the field and helped raise ranks by more than half since 1990, they’ve been graying right along with the rest of us. An estimated 40 percent of employed RNs are now older than 50, and surveys suggest half hope to retire in the next 10 years. With not nearly enough new nurses to take their place and a troublingly high rate of turnover (one in five new nurses will quit within the first year, according to a recent report), one government estimate claims the nation’s health care system could be short as many as one million registered nurses by 2020.

While the number of new nurses may be dwindling, the niches they now fill in health care have multiplied, with specialties in such fields as midwifery and geriatrics, anesthesia and health care informatics. The professional paths people take to nursing are also diverse, says School of Nursing dean Connie Delaney. “I have a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and nursing, and a PhD in educational administration and computers,” says Delaney, “so one of the beauties of this profession is its unprecedented capacity to marry nursing to so many specialties and interests outside of health care.”