Career Advice | The Future of the Nursing Career
A Hard Look at the Facts. The field of nursing is very broad.
Nurses can be found in hospitals, outpatient care, retirement homes, midwives
and beyond. There is always a demand for nurses. There is approximately four
times the number of active nurses as there are active doctors. The nursing field
has grown tremendously and this demand does not fluctuate with the economy.
Currently there is an increased demand for nurses today that can be attributed to many different factors. Registered nurses are the largest health care occupation, with over two million jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, registered nurses held about 2.2 million jobs in 2000. About three out of every five jobs were in hospitals - both inpatient and outpatient departments.
Some indicators of this increased demand are:
- increasing number of elderly
- growing population
- rapidly growing health care industry
- decrease in hospital length of stay
- increase in home health care needs
As the baby boomers grow older, their health care needs increase. The areas affected by the increase in elderly care are the hospitals, private home care and nursing and retirement homes. The demand for nurses in these areas has increased dramatically due to the increase in the aging population.
As the population increases, the demand for many other services increases, including health care. Hospitals are compensating for this demand by increasing their staffing needs. Nurses are highly demanded professionals that are always needed for any position in the health care industry. Nurses are committed to their profession for many years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
"Employment of registered nurses is expected to grow faster than the average for all occupations through 2010, and because the occupation is very large, many new jobs will result. Thousands of job openings also will result from the need to replace experienced nurses who leave the occupation, especially as the median age of the registered nurse population continues to rise."
Nurses are staying in their profession longer than they have in the past. This dedication to a profession is hard to find! According to the Division of Nursing of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 114,000 jobs for nurses will go unfilled in the year 2015. The growing demand for nurses is overtaking the number of nurses there are to fill that demand. This is a great reason to become a nurse in a profession that will always be stable, no matter how much the economy fluctuates.
For more information on this top, visit www.nursingworld.org for the article, Nursing Shortage: Not a Simple Problem - No Easy Answers.
