Center to Champion Nursing to Nationally Address Workforce Shortage

With nearly three million registered nurses, nursing is the largest health profession in the United States. Yet the country is facing a prolonged nursing shortage that threatens to undermine the care provided to patients. Decline in federal support, state interest and local capacity has left the nation without an adequate supply of nurses to fill a growing number of vacancies.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced an effort to address the 1.1 million nurse workforce shortage crisis that is currently poised to strike America’s health care system by 2020. Improving the quality of nursing care is integral to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s mission to improve the health and health care of all Americans. The Foundation is committed to reducing the shortage in nurse staffing and improving the quality of hospital care by transforming the way care is delivered at the bedside.

The newly created Center to Champion Nursing in America will work to improve patient care by pressing for:

• Greater state and federal funding to support expanded nursing education, particularly addressing severe faculty shortages at nurse training institutions across the country. 

• Places for nurse leaders on the governing boards of hospitals and other health care organizations to provide critically needed perspective on improving quality and safety of care. 

• Education, awareness and dissemination of research to inform the public and policy-makers about nurse workforce issues and the link between a trained and adequate nursing workforce and high quality health care. 

A public opinion study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health explored Americans’ perceptions of the quality of hospital care and their knowledge of the nursing shortage. The availability of nurses was indicated as one of the top three factors contributing to poor-quality health care in hospitals. Two-thirds of those surveyed blamed poor quality on overworked, stressed or fatigued nurses.

Americans consider nursing a vital component of quality health care, and the importance of nursing to patients and to health care can hardly be overstated. Nurses care for patients in virtually all locations in which health care is given-hospitals, nursing homes, ambulatory care settings (such as clinics or physicians’ offices), schools, employee workspaces, and private homes. Studies have shown that higher, more adequate levels of hospital nurse staffing result in fewer patients with pneumonia, fewer pressure ulcers, and fewer heart attacks, as well as lower risk of surgical patients dying within their first 30 days in the hospital.

Taking the helm of the new Center to Champion Nursing in America, Susan C. Reinhard began her association with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in 2000 when she was named co-director of the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers, a center co-funded by RWJF. The next year, when RWJF announced its $2.2 million program State Solutions: An Initiative to Improve Enrollment in Medicare Savings Programs, Reinhard agreed to serve as national program director. She has collaborated with RWJF on a number of programs related to nursing and long-term care.

In the spring of 2007, Reinhard accepted the position of director of AARP’s Public

Policy Institute, the “think tank” of the Washington-based AARP. Barely six months later, her association with RWJF came full circle when the two organizations launched the Center to Champion Nursing in America and named Reinhard its director.

Years ago, when Susan C. Reinhard returned home from a day of nursing in Orange,

N.J., her husband remarked that a career taking care of others must be rewarding.

“People say ‘thank you’ to you all day long,” he said.

So when Reinhard recently had surgery and experienced the other side of patient care, the professional nurse sent an enormous sheet cake as a thank you to the hospital nurses who took care of her. “There is never a time when you are more vulnerable than when you are a patient and someone takes care of you,” she said. “It is an intense relationship. As a nurse, you literally save lives. And it is very rewarding.”

After a career that has touched on almost every aspect of nursing, Reinhard now will work to champion nursing and help reverse a nursing shortage in the United States that threatens the quality of health care. Her strategy is twofold:

• Work to retain experienced nurses who provide the key to quality care.
• Educate more nurses by developing more nursing educators.

“We need a huge spotlight on these issues,” says Reinhard, “and AARP is accustomed to spotlighting major issues of our day. The decision by RWJF to put the center within AARP is a brilliant idea. Even if I weren’t here, I would say that. Putting this powerful, consumer-driven organization behind this, we can bring a public voice to this issue.”

At the center, Reinhard plans first to focus on the need to retain nurses. “Society has an insatiable demand for nurses. Because they can fill so many important positions in the health care system, nurses are pulled away from the bed side,” she says. “But if we are going to deal with this crisis over the next couple of years, we have to retain the nurses we have. RWJF’s strategy always has been retention of nurses. To help do that, we are going to take steps to make sure that nurses and their ideas to improve patient care are heard.”

Next, Reinhard wants to work through private and public policy channels to address the shortage of nursing professors, which is at the heart of why nursing schools turn away qualified applicants. Says Reinhard, “We want to speed up how quickly a nurse can get a master’s or doctorate degree. We have to prepare educators.”