Shortage of Nurses in the US - Essay Example

The shortage of nurses in the US greatly interfered with health standards. The essay is aimed at determining ways through which the shortage of nurses in the US would be resolved. The change in Nurses' roles when a shortage of nurses hits any health institution, the most affected are the patients who are in dire need of adequate monitoring to assist them to recover from various ailments, but to maintain nurses the health institutions have to reconsider empowering nurses for the nurses to realize their roles in the health sector through various ways of improving patient care (Cantafalio, 1997, p. 28). However, not all nurses are trained to handle all procedures equally; there are some procedures that only specific nurses would handle hence nurses are forced to learn how to handle any procedure that may come their way (Shi, 2007, p. 50). i.

Recruiting foreign nurses One of the methods that the US utilizes is through recruiting foreign nurses which is aimed at attaining the required number of nurses within a short while to fix the shortage. This is because most foreign nurses just like citizens prefer moving to the USA as well as other foreign countries like the US (William, 2008, p. 103). The reasons behind the growth in demand for nurses include a change in demographic representation for instance high population growth, the increasing number of elderly parents, and effective medication that reduces the redirected their roles and produce more of that of nurses (Willians & Wilkins, 2002, p. 19)ii. Recruiting nurses from WHONurses is very important in any health institution, the shortage of nurses, especially in the USA would impact the global community hence the World Health Organization and other NGOs are likely to assign some of their nurses to be based in the USA to assist avert the nurse’s crisis to aid in saving lives of the innocent people (Shi, 2007, p. 57).iii.

Retention strategies different health institutions, for instance, the ones that have their training schools should organize and retain the best-performing graduates so that they could get direct employment once they are through with their education (Willians & Wilkins, 2002, p. 15). This would reduce the number of nurses required in the US job market. When the number of nurses required is low, they are likely to be comfortable at their places of work (William, 2008, p. 116). However, from the three recruitment processes, I would recommend the nurses retention from then various referral and teaching hospitals in the USA as they are already used to the working conditions in the USA.

However, once they are employed it would be easier to transfer them to various parts of the US (Cantafalio, 1997, p. 41). The effects of nurses understaffing on the patients understaffing would be a health hazard as the patients are likely to attain poor and irregular treatment and monitoring care as the nurses who should be monitoring the patient conditions engaged in other services within the health care institution (William, 2008, p. 122).