Nursing Job Market Tough This Year
TweetWe’ve been hearing the warnings from health industry professionals about the national shortage of nurses for a while now and unfortunately things aren’t looking much better. A Vanderbilt University study before the Affordable Care Act’s passage predicted that the country will be short 260,000 nurses by 2025. With the enactment of healthcare reform, the demand for nurses will skyrocket even further as millions of under-65s become eligible for insurance in 2014 and more Baby Boomers enter their elder years. To combat the looming shortage, nursing schools have expanded their class sizes over the last decade. For example, in Arizona there were 2805 nursing school graduates in 2009 versus 1254 in 2002.
Unfortunately, a new problem has arisen for nurses and those who depend on their care. This year though there aren’t enough nurses out there to care for the sick, there are also many new RNs standing in unemployment lines. How can there be such a huge demand for nurses and simultaneously a crowd of nurses with nowhere to work?
As a result of the recession the job market is flooded with more experienced RNs who’ve come out of retirement, delayed their retirement, or moved from part- to full-time employment in order to stay above water during hard economic times. These experienced nurses have therefore taken many of the jobs and hours which would in normal years be available to new nursing school graduates. One survey of new Arizona RNs revealed 21% licensed in the last year lacked nursing jobs with most respondents citing “not enough jobs for new RN grads in the area” as the reason. Because experienced nurses have taken (or are not retiring as planned from) the better-paying hospital jobs they would normally have applied for, new nurses are instead applying to nursing homes and home health care positions. New nurses are also having to be flexible about location and shifts when applying for the few nursing positions open. Alternatively, many have wound up in non-nursing jobs like waitressing, just happy to have employment and some have even switched careers out of nursing entirely.
New Nurses Can't Find Work This Year
When the economy improves health industry experts expect a wave of retirements, opening the job market to young nurses. Industry experts are hopeful that once the recession passes, new RNs will see a job market like that of the early 2000s where graduates could choose between multiple job offers.  However, they further say it is critical for policy leaders to find ways to keep newly minted nurses in the profession through the recession so that projections for nurse shortages in the future won’t get even worse.
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I am glad that this is good to open up.