Nursing Shortage
WRT101
12/01/05
Mandatory Overtime
The nurses of today are just as important as doctors. Hospitals thrive on their training and skills to care for sick patients. Nurses are the heart and backbone of all hospital facilities. Nurse’s duties consist of injecting pharmaceutical drugs into a patients IV, measuring dosage, monitoring vital signs, keeping detailed logs of intake of medicine and other important procedures that go with the nursing profession. Hospitals all across the world depend on their valuable skills and determination to help people on their recovery (Olvera). There are different types of nurses, all which work in different paced environments. There are those who work in a calm setting were a patient is scheduled for a long stay, and then there are those who work in the emergency room, intensive care unit (ICU), nursing homes, schools and many more diverse areas (Olvera). The emergency room is a fast paced and hardcore working facility. Nurses within that department depend on their high energy and focus to make fast and accurate decisions (Ibid). It is hard to imagine a hospital with a shortage of nurses, but every day it becomes more perceptible that the U.S is going to be faced with a nursing crisis for the years to come (Tieman).
It is estimated that by the year 2020 hospital facilities will be in need of 800,000 Registered Nurses (Fulton). Many hospitals today are currently in need of nurses. Very few of them are appropriately staffed with the adequate number of staff nurses. Although there has been a significant rise in the total number of RN’s over the past years, there is still plenty of holes to fill (Tieman). Research done by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) found that the average age of a Registered Nurse in America was 44.5 for the year of 2000 (Ibid). This is why it is so obvious that the shortage will continue to grow. With more middle aged women retiring the nursing shortage is far from being alleviated anytime soon. 75 % of the hospital openings in America are vacancies for Registered Nurses (Lovern). This clearly shows...