Nursing shortage

When Cape Girardeau nurses met recently with U.S. Sen. Jim Talent, they were eager to share their concerns about what has widely been described as a critical nursing shortage nationwide. The main point: If the federal government is here to help us, you need to know that the federal government is one of our biggest problems.

The nurses cited federally mandated paperwork that consumes more than half of a nurse's time while on duty. This is time that isn't spent providing direct patient care, and the nurses don't see that much of the required record keeping is beneficial overall to their patients.

The paperwork issue is just a part of the overall nursing-shortage picture. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing's Web site cites several contributing factors:

Enrollment is declining at schools of nursing.

Some nursing programs are restricting enrollment due to a shortage of qualified faculty members.

The average age of registered nurses is climbing because fewer younger nurses are entering the profession.

While the number of registered nurses continues to grow, the pace of growth is the slowest in 20 years. And more than 18 percent of registered nurses are not employed in nursing.

As the U.S. population grows older, there will be a need for more nurses to care for the elderly.

Job burnout and dissatisfaction are leading reasons that nurses leave their profession. In many cases, nurses cite scheduling and long hours as more important factors than pay. In particular, nurses want a balance between their professional lives and their responsibilities at home.

As a result of high nurse turnover and unfilled nursing jobs, access to health care is being affected.

Professional nursing organizations are looking for ways to address the shortage of qualified nurses -- a shortage that could grow to 400,000 nurses by 2020. National media campaigns have been launched to improved the image of nursing. Nursing organizations are working at the middle school and high school levels to encourage students to think about nursing as a career.

And, while nurses complain about federal paperwork requirements, their professional organizations are appealing to Congress to help reverse the nursing shortage. The Nurse Reinvestment Act was signed by President Bush in 2002. Congress appropriated more than $150 million for the act in its first year, and efforts are being made to increase that by nearly a third in the current budget.

It appears that one area of nursing that might benefit from a critical review is whether more time should be spent on providing patient care and less time filling out forms. If paperwork requirements for registered nurses in the United States were cut by just 10 percent, it would result in adding the equivalent of 275,000 nurses to direct patient care. That would go a long way in offsetting the nursing shortage.