THE NURSING SHORTAGE

Running head: NURSING SHORTAGE
Nursing Shortage
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

NURSING SHORTAGE1
Nurses and Health care system shares an integral connection when it comes to the point of
imparting health services all across the globe. For achieving a state of optimal quality of health,
and for promoting the improvement of health status, The World Health Organisation, states the
need for the increase in health care staff and professionals, by 2030. Moreover, professionally,
Nurses form the most extensive professional unit globally and constitute almost more than 50%
of the total health workforce. As per the reports of World Health Organisation (WHO, 2014), and
World Bank (2014), there has been a shortage in the number of nurses and midwives, which
accounts for 9 million, and a further reduction to 7.6 million by 2030. This leads to the
conception of the issue, known as "Nursing Shortage." As the term defines, it generally refers to
the situation in which the demand of the nurses exceeds the present supply, on different
geographical levels (Haryanto, 2019). The various measures to determine the availability of
nurses and potential nursing shortage is to calculate the nurse-to-population ration, nurse-to-
patient ratio or accounting the number of nursing job openings, which should be in compliance to
the demand of nurses. Nursing Shortage has been a serious matter of concern in the Canadian
state. The Canadian Nurses Association, warns that the nation will experience extreme nursing
shortage issues in the upcoming years (French & Emed, 2018). As per the predictions of CNA,
there will be a shortage of 60,000 nurses by the year 2022. Therefore, this study will emancipate
an articulate analysis related to the lack of nursing staff in Canada, based on three relevant
reports or reviews. A comparative and summative analytical view of these three studies, along
with a reflective take on the said issue, will also be put forth.
Article 1: Newspaper Report - Nursing shortage a problem in Canada (CNN News, 2018)
This article puts forth a summative report about the prevalent issue regarding the shortage
of nurses in Canada. According to this news report, "There's an acute nursing shortage in the

NURSING SHORTAGE2
United States, but schools are turning away thousands of qualified applicants as they struggle to
expand class size and hire more teachers for nursing programs’’. This report laid emphasis on
the fact that there has been an ever-increasing deploration in the count of the working and
available nursing professionals, accompanied by an inherent rise in the demand for more nursing
staff (Snavely, 2016). The report stated the estimates of American Nursing Association, that the
current count of nurses in the United States is 3 million, demanding an increase in another one
million by 2022, to provide stability to the health services all around the state (Bittner & Bechtel,
2018). The article also displays one of the central underlying cause behind this issue, that is, the
less enrollment of students in the nursing schools, with a consequent reduction in the count of
newly joining nurses in the health units (Ariste, Béjaoui & Dauphin, 2019). Moreover, there has
been an enhanced growth in the rate of drop-outs and retired cases of nurses. The report has also
put forth the data given by American colleges of Nursing, stating, that in 2017, nearly about
56000 of the total applicants for the nursing profession, were turned down by the nursing
colleges. The reason behind this, is considered to be, the dearth of efficient teaching staff, which
cascades into the shortened enrollment of nursing students and the resultant shortage of nurses.
Article 2: The nursing shortage in the United States: an integrative review of the literature
This research review put forth a summative view about the increased trends of shortage
or scarcity of nurses all over the world. This study further validated about the increased threat in
the nursing profession and subsequently in the health unit given the enhanced number of nurses
retiring and a considerably lesser number of individuals joining the profession (Owenz, 2019).
Therefore, in this aspect, there is an urgent need for interventions and plans for combatting this
global shortage of nurses (Anderson, 2019). This article has put forth a summarized view of the
manifold strategies which are been initiated to combat the growing demand for RNs (Registered