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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
* To combat the nursing shortage, efforts to promote nursing as a career have been successful.
* However, academic nursing institutions are not adequately prepared for this new influx of applicants.
* The lack of faculty to educate the growing demand for baccalaureate- prepared RNs directly impacts the nursing shortage. The nursing shortage thus directly impacts safe patient care.
* The main reasons for the lack of faculty to meet the demand for more nurses include the increased age of the current faculty and the declining number of years left to teach, expected increases in faculty retirements, less compensation for academic teaching than positions in clinical areas for master's-prepared nurses, and finally, not enough master's and doctoral-prepared nurses to fill the needed nurse educator positions
* It is in the best interest of the nursing profession to do what it does best by incorporating the nursing process to solve the faculty shortage and secure its future in order to protect the lives of patients.
WHILE THE NURSING SHORTAGE remains a high priority and initiatives are being put into place to address it, a growing concern has emerged related to another type of shortage - nursing faculty. Great strides have been made to recruit more nurses into the nursing profession with efforts such as the Johnson & Johnson ad campaigns, federal and state funding for education tuition, and a focus on healthy work environments for nurses. As a result, nursing schools are seeing an increase in enrollments as evidenced by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN, 2005) preliminary survey showing an increase of 13% in entry-level baccalaureate nursing programs from 2004 to 2005. However, with this increase in enrollments comes a need for an increase in nursing faculty and clinical sites in which to educate these new nurses. If there are not enough qualified faculty to teach nursing students, the nursing shortage will most likely worsen. This will indeed have a direct effect on the quality of care that patients receive nationwide. Multiple factors have emerged that shed light on the seriousness of the situation and innovative strategies are being implemented to help solve the nursing faculty shortage. Faculty shortage solutions are the guiding force for additional nursing student admissions.
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