SHORTAGE OF HEALTHCARE WORKERS

Shortage Of Healthcare Workers

Shortage Of Healthcare Workers

A Shortage of Care

The statistics display us just how awful this dilemma is in Iowa. There are 2,516 projected RN vacancies amidst employers who interviewed with the Iowa doctors' Association from November 20, 2000. This number reflects only the RN vacancies. We should furthermore take into consideration the LPN and CNA vacancies as well which will add up to an even more distracting number of places left vacant in our healthcare environments.

In supplement to the difficulty of present vacancies is the outlook of present nurses retiring. Using information from the Iowa Board of Healthcare, 60% of actively licensed nurses will be over the age of 50 and may be retired by 2009 (Iowa Nurses' Association, 2003).

The paper describes the need to replace the nurses retiring; however, the number of people enrolling and graduating from healthcare schools has declined. In RN and LPN programs, we have seen a decrease in the number of graduates by 27 percent over the past six years.( Iowa Nurses' Association, 2003). We are losing nurses and then do not have the number of graduates to replace those people when they retire, which only adds to the shortage.

 Just when we think we have as much of this problem we can take, we have to consider the people who teach the nurses of tomorrow. A survey conducted in the fall of 2000 showed us that 49% of the faculty in healthcare education programs plans to retire within ten years (Iowa Nurses' Association, 2003). As a result, we are looking at an existing shortage of nurses that will grow with a larger older population, then we will take away 60% of the current nurses retiring in ten years and on top of that we have half the faculty to teach the nurses of tomorrow.

What can we do to fix this problem before it gets so out of hand we can't deal with it? First, it is believed that we need to address the issue of attracting more people to the healthcare profession and keeping them in that profession for the length of their careers. We can't change the fact that people are going to be retiring, so we need to start now in attracting younger people to choose healthcare as their career. Ways to attract a younger generation into choosing healthcare as their profession would be to increase salaries, and provide more educational funding and loan forgiveness for nurses who stay in Iowa to practice. Governor Vilsack signed legislation in April, 2002 to create a Registered Nurse Recruitment Program that would be administered by the Iowa College Student Aid Commission, however, to date, funding has not been provided that would provide forgivable loans and tuition scholarships for students and loan repayments for nurses (Iowa Department of Public Health, 2003).

Some people might argue why we should give loan repayment forgiveness to nurses and not include other professions as well. I ask you to look at just how much we ...