“If we got anywhere near the funding physicians got, we wouldn’t have a shortage,” says Cheryl Peterson, director of the American Nurses Association’s Department of Nursing Practice and Policy.

A teaching shortage
When it comes to the inadequate number of nurses in the workforce, it’s not a sign of a lack of interest in the profession. It’s actually the opposite.

“There is not enough faculty to teach people who want to be nurses,” says Rosseter. “It’s not that folks aren’t interested in becoming nurses — schools can’t handle the capacity.”

AACN reported that in 2008, U.S. nursing schools turned away nearly 50,000 nursing applicants due to a lack of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space and budget constraints. Nearly two-thirds of the nursing schools surveyed for the report cited faculty shortages as a reason for not accepting all qualified applicants.

Peterson calls the faculty shortage and the lack of funding for nursing programs a “big barrier” to increasing the workforce pool.

“We’re trying to ramp-up capacity, but we have these limitations of funding, faculty, sites,” she says. “We have the students...we don’t have the capacity to educate [them].”

“It takes awhile to produce faculty,” says Rosseter.

It takes nurses at least six years to complete their masters and eight years for a doctoral, not far behind physicians, making it impossible to address the shortage in the workforce immediately.

With educators still being educated, it’s not likely the nursing shortage will abate. According to a 2008 report from the Council on Physician and Nursing Supply, 30,000 additional nurses should graduate annually to meet the nation’s health care needs — an increase of 30 percent over the current number of annual graduates.

Nurses are baby boomers too
According to numbers from a 2006 Nursing Management Aging Workforce survey, 55 percent of nurses reported they plan to retire between 2011 and 2020.

Despite a slight easing of the shortage due to older nurses delaying retirement because of the recession, a 2009 article by Buerhaus in Health Affairs cited a rapidly aging workforce as a key contributor to the projected shortage.

“How do we retain [older nurses]?” asks ANA’s Peterson. “How do we keep an engaged older workforce?”

She offers suggestions, including better pension programs, better wages and a phased retirement plan, which would allow nurses to move from full-time to part-time before retiring completely.

In 2008, Peterson says, the average age of an employed registered nurse was 45.5, and generally, nurses retire around 55.

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