More nurses will be needed

EDITORIAL: More nurses will be needed
Byline: The Wilson Daily Times, N.C.
Type: Editorial

Dec. 7--Wilson Community College and Wilson Medical Center are looking ahead as they convert a vacant building into a high-tech learning laboratory for nursing students. With $450,000 from the Golden LEAF Foundation, the college and hospital will turn the former Wilson-Greene Mental Health Center on the hospital campus into a lab for nursing students. State-of-the-art mannequins will simulate patient symptoms, reactions and behaviors, giving nursing students safe and realistic opportunities to practice their skills.

The Golden LEAF funds will be used to purchase seven high-tech mannequins and three more mannequins that are not quite as sophisticated. The former Mental Health Center will be remodeled as a hospital ward with patient rooms, a nursing station and a simulated environment for students. Cameras will record learning sessions so that procedures can be reviewed and critiqued.

The aim of this laboratory and other efforts to encourage nursing students is the national shortage of registered nurses. Nurses have been in short supply for several years with crises arising periodically in various locations.

There are many reasons for the nursing shortage, which shows little sign of disappearing:

--A study earlier this year estimates that the nation's nursing shortage will increase to 340,000 by 2020.

--A 2006 study found that 55 percent of registered nurses, including a majority of nurse managers, intend to retire between 2011 and 2020.

--Although employment of registered nurses in hospitals increased by 185,000 between 2001 and 2004, more than 80 percent of physicians and nurses thought their hospitals told a poll they thought there was a nursing shortage where they worked.

--Nurses are older as fewer young people enter the profession. In March 2004, the average registered nurse was 46.8 years old, and only 8 percent of the nursing population was under 30.

--Nurses are essential to health care. They are the first line of contact with patients and are expected to handle increasingly sophisticated and complicated procedures. Without an adequate supply of good nurses, hospitals and other medical facilities cannot function.

The effort by Wilson Medical Center and Wilson Community College should help ease the nursing shortage by improving training of student nurses. Golden LEAF or another philanthropy might also consider scholarships for nurses who will agree to work in underserved rural areas, where recruiting medical professionals can be difficult.

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