Why is there a shortage of nurses? essay sample

The lack of qualified nurses becomes a new problem in health care, and we cannot deny it. The population is aging and old nurses are gradually retiring. To continue normal functioning, hospitals need much more nurses than they have today, even more than the retiring number. But everyone has different insights into the problem, and the shortage of nurses does not look the same for doctors, students, and medical schools.

Patients are the first to suffer from the lack of nurses, but their doctors do not have a good time either. Healthcare experts say there are not enough qualified nurses to enter the field, especially in geriatrics that depends even more on nurses than on gerontologists. On the other hand, hospitals are not always fully aware of how many nurses they need. Healthcare providers consider they do their job well by merely replacing retiring nurses with the young applicants.

Students who want to enter the field may have problems squeezing into a limited number of places at a medical school. To them, it looks like the field is too demanding and prestigious to accept all the applicants willing to nurse at the hospitals. In 2014, the US schools dismissed about 70,000 promising high school graduates who wanted to become a nurse. But educational establishments do not feel like they cannot meet the demand. Schools have limited capacities and accept only the part of students they can room.

The lack of nursing education is clearly the reason behind the shortage of medical care professionals. Schools hardly expand their capacities at the moment, and educators retire fast.  To solve the problem, nursing schools shall pay bigger attention to what happens in the field. Many of them would find arranging new campuses and hiring teachers more profitable than before.