US faced with major shortage of nurses

The University of Central Florida (UCF) just announced that it has secured $10 million from AdventHealth and Orlando Health to construct a new UCF College of Nursing building to expand its nursing enrollment by at least 50 percent and help alleviate Florida's nursing shortage.

It is projected that Florida faces a dire nurse staffing shortage that will result in a deficit of 60,000 nurses by 2035. UCF is currently graduating about 260 nurses a year and hopes to increase that number to about 400 with its expansion plan.

Florida isn't alone. The United States healthcare system is experiencing a serious shortage of nurses, and the backlog of green card processing is stopping qualified foreign nurses from entering the workforce and making the situation even worse, reported The Wall Street Journal.

The US has historically relied on employing nurses from other countries to handle the heavy load of medical care. According to a 2022 statement made to the Senate by the American Hospital Association, 16.6 percent of all healthcare professionals in the US in 2016 were born outside the US, and almost 5 percent aren't citizens. Similarly, foreign-born nurses account for 15 percent of registered nurses.

However, in early 2021, the State Department implemented a new visa prioritization system that relegated nurses and health professionals to the last tier. Now employment of foreign nurses has come to a virtual stop because the green card quota set aside for nurses has been oversubscribed so much that the State Department in June stopped processing such applications from anyone who applied after February 2022.

Unlike other sectors such as technology, foreign nurses can't obtain temporary working visas like H-1B to work in the US while the green card application is being processed. As a result, many health institutions expecting incoming foreign nurses now find they will have to do without them for some time.

Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge, Georgia, had 14 international nurses on track to arrive, but now they must wait.

"Because of the situation, I'm unable to get more. We can't get them here. It means our patients suffer because we can't provide the care they need," Paula Butts, chief nursing officer Piedmont, told the Journal.

While some call for a more relaxed immigration policy for foreign nurses, others argue that there is no real shortage of nurses in the US. What needs to be changed is retaining nurses with higher salaries and benefits, they say.

A reader by the name of Richard Dole, commenting on the Journal report, said that there is "zero" nursing shortage in the US.

"I have four registered nurses in my family, and I can tell you the reason they refuse to work for these large hospital systems (usually nonprofit, paying their CEO millions), is due to horrible treatment and low pay," Dole wrote.

Nurses are woefully underpaid for the responsibilities they have for patient care, another reader said. "From my personal observation when my husband was hospitalized for 10 days, he received more personal attention and care from the nurses in his unit, especially the charge nurse, than the doctors," another reader wrote.

Many nurses have left the workforce in the past couple of years. The recently released 2022 National Nursing Workforce Study conducted by the NCSBN (the National Council of State Boards of Nursing), approximately 100,000 registered nurses (RN) and 34,000 licensed practical and vocational nurses (LPN/VN) have left the workforce over the past two years, specifically due to overwork during the pandemic.

Agencies contributed to this story.