The Impact of Nursing Shortage on the Healthcare Industry - Research Paper Example

The healthcare professional shortage was one of the chief impediments in the achievement of United Nation’s Millennium Development goals to remove poverty, hunger, improvement of education systems, reduction in morbidity, and mortality as written in the guidelines of the year 2004 that are provided by the international nursing council (Littlejohn, Campbell & Collins-McNeil, 2012).

 The problem of shortage of acute care nurses had a relation to the past historical staffing, appointment, resources, nursing demand estimation, and nursing concerns for healthcare services of a country. The issue of shortage of nurses was not easily measurable and demands extraordinary planning and requirements. The relative shortages involved the accessibility of qualified and skilled professionals for the vacancy; however, they did not meet other criteria for employment (Dinsdale, 2004). The absolute shortage represents a situation that lacked the availability of skilled people for a particular vacancy. The shortages may include the impact of fair consideration, geographical position, retention, and recruitment challenges meeting the replacement demands. The challenges to resolve nurse-related issues included coordinated policies and package development to provide long-term and sustained solutions (Buchan & Aiken, 2008).

The nursing requirement could be fulfilled through the promotion of education as well as by the availability of facilities for professional nurses to deliver sufficient care to patients. It could further assist in improving community health and attracting more clients to the healthcare industry. According to the “Health Resources and Services Administration” HRSA report (2006) it was expected that the shortage of nurses would elevate up to one million by the year 2020. The reports had also shown that the shortages are not because of a lack of competent prospective nurses available to enroll in professional education, but it occurred because of lack of resources, nursing college’s inability to increase enrollment, and availability of faculty. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it was expected that the government would increase the number of registered nurses by up to 22% by the end of the year 2018. This reflected that the designing of proper policy agenda can decline the challenges related to decreasing the nursing workforce (Deloitte, 2012).  

Problem Statement
            The number of nurses was decreasing in number in many countries of the world, and the number of people suffering from different diseases was increasing. There were few nurses who are ready to help the suffering mankind due to many reasons and the shortage of nurses was creating many impacts on patients as well as the healthcare industry.

The rationale of the Study
            This study had been selected to examine the impact of nurse shortages on the health care industries to deliver adequate health care assessment, diagnosis, and treatment services to patients. The evaluation of the required number of nurses on the basis of the patient-to-nurse ratio and availability of floor nurses (Dinsdale, 2004).