The problem on nursing shortage is foreseen to aggravate in the coming years. This is based on the fact that baby boomers are aging in contrast to the growing need of health care services in the United States. For hospitals not to feel the intense impact of becoming deficient in workforce, administrators and operators are re-structuring their strategy of nurse recruiting and plan of retaining their staff’s loyalty.
To attract registered nurses, big time signing bonuses along with flexible working schedules await applicants. Hospitals in Tennessee are in a competition of who among them are offering the best employment package. Aside from being generous in terms of salary package, employers are re-inventing the conventional way of recruitment by scouting applicants and holding social based recruiting events on malls and other public places.
An approximation of 800,000 to 1 million nurses are needed by 2020 due to the shortage of nurses, this was a previous forecast. Now, the estimated need may had lowered down to 350, 000 to 400,000, as noted by Joan Creasia—dean of the University of Tennessee College of Nursing that is due to the increase of nursing students and programs overtime. However, nursing schools, colleges, and universities are still facing the problem of increasing their capacity of meeting the over-all demand for health services since having the number is not a guarantee of public health.
Furthermore, more than 2,000 aspiring nursing students had been turned down by colleges and universities in Tennessee due to insufficient number of nurse educators, classroom spaces and limited funding. Creasia said that among three applicants for the nursing program of UT College of Nursing, only one of them is being admitted in the university. For that fact, the University Of Tennessee Medical Center finds innovation necessary at the moment and should be implemented immediately to be able to address an additional 405 patients daily. This hospital had started the development of aggressive recruitment program to be able to employ not only an adequate number of nurse staff but also a skilled and competent nurse workforce.
The emergence of online nursing degrees is also another way of dealing with the critical shortage of health professionals. Many hospitals running their nursing schools are offering distance learning nursing programs. These had provided avenues for students who want to earn a degree in nursing while working on their present career in the meantime. Hospitals in TN are also grabbing those nursing graduates who finished a nursing course based on a distant-learning environment.
