Nurses take care of sick patients and vulnerable people, but who takes care of our nurses? Nurse shortage in Kansas is becoming one of the principal issues and the most challenging problem for Kansas hospitals. The nursing staff shortage is a day-to-day problem in hospitals and long-term care facilities in Great Bend, Kansas, and surrounding areas. Considering that many nurses will be retiring in the next few years, the increase in age population demanding more hospital care, as well as the lack of school faculty members, the nursing shortage has never seemed more alarming. The demand for nurses in Kansas is expected to increase drastically as the baby boomers' generation reaches 60 and older. While the need for healthcare services is increasing, the nurse workforce continues to age. This trend is expected to continue.
Unless the number of nurses changes in proportion with the increase in the population and aggressive plans for recruitment, retention, and adequate funding is implemented. The spike in health problems such as obesity, more people need health services due to chronic problems such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and many other illnesses, but this not only an issue for the patients; this also creates more demands of nurses around the state. Furthermore, another nursing shortage's reason falls on the lack of faculty members. The nursing faculty shortage corresponds with the clinical nursing shortage due to the deficient number of qualified nursing faculty in educational programs that will replace aging and retiring faculty.
"NURSE SHORTAGE IS BECOMING ONE OF THE PRINCIPAL ISSUES AND THE MOST CHALLENGING PROBLEM FOR KANSAS HOSPITALS."
As stated earlier, the nursing shortage in Kansas is affected by different issues and situations, considering the leading problem is the scarcity of faculty members. To replace the older retiring workforce of nurses in Kansas, younger nurses hold critical implications and cooperative actions between nursing executives and academic centers. Multifaced, proactive and innovative actions such as simulation training and class attendance via skype, targeting more demographic groups, such as minorities or foreign-born students, could be a possible solution for the shortage. Incentivizing faculty members' prospects with signing bonuses, tuition reimbursements, and scholarships could also be considered a booster and a possible solution to resolve some of these issues in the shortage in Kansas educators.
The solutions are here, and Kansas is heading in the right direction to overcome the nursing shortage challenge. Nurses are supposed to take care of the vulnerable, but I am convinced that Kansas's nurses are the vulnerable part of this story after digging more into the articles and statistics.
All these statistics and facts shared in this writing can be corroborated at:
2020 Registered Nurse Shortage Predicted in the US and Kansas. KDHE, 2010, www.kdheks.gov Challenges of Nursing Faculty Retention. J. Harris, 2019, www.go.gale.com Nursing Shortage: Good for nurses, bad for patients. R. Wenzl, 2013, www.kansas.com