WASHINGTON, June 27 (UPI) -- In the short run, hospitals may have managed to stave off a nurse staffing crisis, but in the long run, they may not be so lucky, a new study says.
"At this point, the hospitals' staffing problem has calmed down a bit," said Jessica May, a health research analyst at the Center for Studying Health System Change and author of the study appearing on the Web site of the journal Health Affairs.
"But the shortage is going to intensify in the future and we're concerned about how providers will deal with it," she told United Press International.
And when the crisis arrives, it could have a tremendous impact on the healthcare system. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that by 2012 there could be a shortage of 1 million nurses or more.
One of the causes of the shortage is the fact that it was traditionally an occupation for women, May said. Now, women who would have become nurses in the past are pursuing medical degrees and other opportunities.
Nursing as a profession has also become virtually synonymous with poor working conditions, long hours and low pay, she said, reducing its ability to attract new people. Nurses also tend to have a low job-approval rate, and many qualified nurses work in non-nursing jobs.
In the short term, hospitals have taken steps to address these problems.
They have bolstered their staff with temporary workers and offered increased pay and benefits, and this has actually alleviated the problem for the hospitals in the 12 communities included in the study.
But to avoid longer-term problems, even bigger steps are needed, May said.
The first step would be to attack nursing's image problem head on -- and not just by raising pay. The study also suggests higher nurse staffing levels and greater use of support staff for patients' personal care needs.
"We need to make improvements to the nursing work environment in an organized, centralized way," May said, "to make it look like a more attractive profession."
The second step would be to address the dire undercapacity in the nation's nursing schools. Hospitals can make a long-term investment in this by allowing their senior nurses to participate in guest teacher programs, the study said. More government investment could also help.
"There is an important role for public financial support to expand the nursing education system and especially to address the shortage of nurse faculty," the authors said. "Our research (also) concludes that policymakers can guide the ways hospitals respond to the nurse shortage ... for example, by using performance on the nurse-sensitive quality measures formalized by the National Quality Forum" to recognize high-performing hospitals, the study said.
If the nursing bottleneck is not addressed in a systemic, far-reaching way, May said, the consequences could be dire for the healthcare system as a whole.
"If the shortage continues and hospitals continue to raise salaries in response, significant cost could be passed on to consumers and payers," she said. "Also, if hospitals don't have enough nurses, it could compromise access to care or affect the quality of care."
