Part One: The Longest Running Nursing Shortage in History

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There have been shortages of nurses in this country since the 1960's but they have always resolved themselves fairly quickly. This nursing shortage, which began in 1998, not only persists but is expected to get a lot worse.

	Nurse MJ Pender in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit with nurse graduate Allison Smith. (Photo: Chiya Louie) Click here to see more photos of nurses featured in this documenary.

80 million baby boomers are slated to retire in the next decade and they will need a lot more medical care. At the same time many experienced nurses will be leaving the profession. The shortage began after managed care ushered in an era of cost cutting in the early 1990s. Nurses were replaced by lesser skilled workers. In Massachusetts 27 percent of hospital nurses were laid off, the largest number in the country. The profession became unattractive to women who began to have many other career choices. But as nurses left the workforce, studies showed that patient care suffered. One study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that patients whose nurse cares for 8 or more people have a 30 percent greater chance of dying than if their nurse cares for four patients.

As hospitals started experiencing acute shortages of nurses, they responded by raising salaries and offering bonuses to nurses to enter the profession. Media campaigns were launched to extol the attractions of nursing. By 2003 185 thousand registered nurses entered this nation's hospital workforce. But even with this huge influx of nurses the shortage in 2007 is still here, and as demand for nurses increases many agree the gap will steadily grow.

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