• An August 2002 Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) report found that a shortage of nurses in America’s hospitals contributes to nearly a quarter of all unexpected incidents that adversely affect hospitalized patients.
• A May 2002 New England Journal of Medicine report found that nursing shortages were found to correlate with longer lengths of stay, increased incidence of urinary tract infections and upper gastrointestinal bleeding, higher rates of pneumonia, shock and cardiac arrest.
• The 2001 study The Healthcare Workforce Shortage and Its Implications for America’s Hospitals concluded nursing shortages lead to emergency department overcrowding, emergency department diversions, increased wait times for surgery, discontinued patient care programs or reduced service hours, delayed discharges, and canceled surgeries.
• The national nursing shortage also is affecting our nation’s 7.6 million veterans who receive care through the 1,300 Veterans Administration (VA) health care facilities. The VA reports a 10 percent shortage of nurses.

• The lack of young people entering the nursing profession has increased the average age of the RN population to an estimated 47 years.
• HRSA projects that, if recent trends continue, the number of RNs leaving the workforce will outpace those entering the profession by 2016.
• In FY 2005, HRSA was forced to turn away 82 percent of the applicants for the Nurse Education Loan Repayment Program and more than 98 percent of the applicants for the Nursing Scholarship Program due to lack of adequate funding.
• The Department of Labor reports that America’s demand for RNs will grow 29 percent between 2004 and 2014.
• The National Center on Healthcare Workforce Analysis (NCHWA) estimates that the U.S. needs to graduate approximately 90 percent more nurses than it did in 2000 to meet projected growth in the demand for RNs in 2020.
• Demand for nursing services is expected to greatly accelerate beginning in 2010 as the leading edge of 77 million baby boomers turn 65.

• The faculty shortage is the primary barrier to increasing enrollments, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). As a result, at least 32,617 qualified applicants to entry-level baccalaureate programs were turned away from schools of nursing in 2005 based on responses from 432 schools. Some of these qualified students are being placed on waiting lists that may be as long as two years or more, however many are opting for other career choices.
• In a survey of the 2004-2005 academic year conducted by the National League for Nursing (NLN), an estimated 147,000 qualified applications were turned away from nursing programs at all degree levels owing in large part to the lack of faculty necessary to teach this number of additional students. This number represents a 17.6 percent increase from last year’s figures.
• The number of full-time nursing faculty required to “fill the nursing gap” is approximately 40,000. Currently, there are less than 20,000 full-time nursing faculty in the system.
• The nurse faculty shortage is only expected to worsen with time. Faculty age continues to climb, averaging 52 years in 2004, and significant numbers of faculty are expected to retire in the coming years with insufficient numbers of candidates in the pipeline to take their places.
• The inability of the nation’s nursing schools to accept all qualified applicants was due in a large part to the shortage of nursing faculty.

The organizations listed below together urge the Congress to increase funding in FY 2007 to $175 million for the nursing recruitment, education, and retention programs at HRSA. We appreciate that our Nation faces many challenges and that Congress has limited resources with which to address these challenges. While we acknowledge that this request falls short of meeting the current and future needs for nurses, we have serious concerns that without increased funding to strengthen the nation’s nursing workforce we will be unable to ensure that people have access to the quality, comprehensive health care they need and deserve.