Nursing Profession: A Nursing Case Study

There are many issues that affect the profession of nursing, however there is one issue that has been affecting the nursing profession for decades and this issue is the nursing shortage in the United States. There has always seemed to be a nursing shortage in the United States, until the recent recession that started in 2007. The Great Recession of 2007 made it so older nurses did not retire when he or she normally would have and other nurses came out of retirement to help support his or her family during the recession. Per Juraschek, Zhang, Ranganathan, and Lin (2012), starting in 2003 the age group of forty-five to fifty-four replaced the age group of thirty-five to forty-four as having the largest number of working registered nurses. Per …show more content…
By older nurses not retiring there has been more than the expected number of RNs in the workforce. In the U.S there is around eight hundred and fifty thousand RNs between the age of fifty to sixty-four and these RNs make up one-third of the RN workforce (cite). Additionally, certain regions of the U.S. have a greater number of older RNs which will lead to their retirement affecting these regions more than other regions. The New England Region of the U.S has the greatest number of older RNs and not enough younger RNs entering the workforce to replace the retiring nurses (cite). RNs older than fifty make up forty-five percent of the RN workforce in this region and only thirty-two percent of the RNs are less than forty years old (cite). Between the years 2001 and 2014 the New England region averaged four thousand five hundred full time RNs entering the profession and one thousand eight hundred RNs left the profession each year whereas, West South Central Region of the U.S. gained three times the number of RNs each year and only two thousand two hundred RNs left the profession (cite). Per Auerbach, Buehaus, and Stager (2016), the New England Region has the slowest growth of RNs and it is expected to stay this way until the year 2030. IIn addition to the New England Region, the West Region also has a …show more content…
it will have a negative impact on patient care. Patient care will be affected because when there is a nursing shortage nurses are required to take care of more patients and work more hours, which leads to nurses being burnout (Cite). In a study done by Cimiotti, Aiken, Sloane, and Wu (2012), hospital nurses experience high amount of burnout and this leads to increased amounts of catheter associated urinary tract infections and surgical site infections. In this study the nurses had on average 5.7 patients and over one-third of the nurses reported he or she had job related burnout. Additionally, for every one thousand patients sixteen patients got some type of infection while at the hospital. Furthermore, this study concluded by increasing a nurse’s patient load by one patient the risk for these patients getting a catheter associated urinary tract infection or a surgical site infection increased greatly. Also, the study showed for every ten percent increase in nurse reported burnout at a hospital there was an increase in rate of urinary tract infections by one per one thousand patients and an increase in surgical site infections by two per one thousand patients. Additionally, other studies have shown increasing nurse to patient ratios leads to increase amounts of clostridium difficile, central line associated blood stream infections, and ventilator associated pneumonia due to nurses not being