Nursing Shortage Masked by "Flood" of Delayed Retirements

According to a story in USA Today, the National Student Nurses' Association has issued an advisory for new nursing school grads warning them that the job market is "flooded" with experienced RNs who have come out of retirement, delayed retirement or gone from part-time to full-time employment because of the recession. Thus, many newly graduated registered nurses can't find jobs.

While large shortages of nurses are still forecast, the story also cites a June 2009 survey by the association of 2,112 spring RN graduates which found 44% hadn't yet landed a nursing job. This reinforces the findings published in 2009 by Vanderbilt University that the recession was temporarily ending a shortage of nurses, but that projected a nursing shortage of 260,000 registered nurses developing by 2025. USA Today quotes:

"It's enough to do significant interruptions to the health care system and potentially even render it inoperable," says Peter Buerhaus, the study's author and director of Vanderbilt's Center for Interdisciplinary Health Workforce Studies. He says it's critical for policy leaders to find a way to keep new nursing graduates in the profession through the recession so projected shortages aren't even worse.

Source: USA Today"New RNs find job market tight" (July 9, 2010)