A report released Monday by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) indicate that efforts to grow and diversify the nursing workforce are showing results—a welcome finding given the looming shortage of nurses and primary care providers in general.

According to the data from HRSA's National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, the nursing profession grew substantially in the 2000s, adding 24 percent more registered nurses (RNs) and 15.5 percent more licensed practical nurses (LPNs). Significantly, the growth in the supply of nurses outpaced growth in the U.S. population, with the number of RNs per capita growing by about 14 percent and the number of LPNs per capita increasing by 6 percent.

The "pipeline" carrying nurses from school to the workforce also expanded during the past decade. The number of would-be nurses who passed national nurse licensing exams to become RNs more than doubled between 2001 and 2011, while the number of LPN test-passers grew by 80 percent. Significantly, the share of licensure candidates with bachelor's degrees increased during that time, as well.

The profession also is growing more diverse, according to the data. Non-white RNs are now 25 percent of the profession, up from 20 percent 10 years ago. Nine percent of RNs are men today, up slightly from 8 percent at the beginning of the decade.

The full analysis is available at HRSA's website.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows, alumni and grantees. Some recent examples:

CBS Evening News profiled RWJF Community Health Leader Roseanna Means, MD, who founded the nonprofit Women of Means in 1988 to provide free medical care to homeless women in the Boston area. Today, 16 volunteer doctors and staff nurses provide care at the city’s shelters to women with unique sensitivities and needs. Read a post Means wrote about her nonprofit for the RWJF Human Capital Blog.

A study led by RWJF Clinical Scholars alumnus Matthew M. Davis, MD, MAPP, finds more than 40 percent of American parents give over-the-counter cough and cold medicines to children under age 4, despite product label warnings to the contrary. Health Day and the Examiner report on the findings.

Helena Hansen, MD, PhD, an alumna of the RWJF Health & Society Scholars program, is the lead author of an analysis that concludes social determinants—rather than changes in the environment or flawed diagnostic criteria—help explain the dramatic rise in the number of Americans diagnosed with mental disorders in recent years. Health Canal and MedPage Today report on the findings.

Forty-seven percent of children with cancer who receive part of their treatment at home have been exposed to at least one medication error, according to a study led by RWJF Physician Faculty Scholars alumna Kathleen E. Walsh, MD, MSc. Those errors had the potential to harm 36 per 100 patients, and actually did cause injury to four per 100, MedPage Today reports.

Kathleen J. Mullen, PhD, is an alumna of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research program, and an economist and associate director of the RAND Center for Disability Research at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

Dementia, a chronic disease characterized by significant impairment of cognitive functioning, afflicts 15 of every 100 Americans over age 70 – and it is their caregivers who are perhaps most familiar with the disease’s effects.

Family members are often the ones who find themselves navigating the complex system of nursing homes, in-home health care, and health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance), all while dealing with heartbreaking changes in the physical and mental functioning of their spouses, siblings, parents or grandparents. Indeed, my own family is struggling to sort through an overwhelming number of options and decisions to help ensure that my 86-year old grandmother receives the best available care now that she is unable to live without daily assistance.

For many families, a significant barrier to that best available care is cost: Caring for someone with dementia is extremely expensive. A recent RAND study, the results of which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, offers some of the most comprehensive and credible estimates to date of the monetary costs of dementia in the United States. These costs include both out-of-pocket spending and spending by Medicare, Medicaid, and other third parties on nursing home and hospital stays, medical visits, outpatient surgery, home health care, special services (such as outpatient rehabilitation), prescription drugs, dental services, and other needs.

Jason Houle, PhD, is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin. He recently published a study online in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine that finds association between depressive symptoms and mortality is due to later health problems, not prior physical health conditions.

Human Capital Blog: Why did you decide to look at this particular topic?

Jason Houle: I first started looking at this topic in graduate school, when I took a course on event history models (a quantitative method often used when studying mortality). Up to that point, most of my research focused on the social determinants of mental health, but I had become increasingly interested in the link between mental and physical health. While there’s a long literature on how depression influences physical health (and vice versa), as a demographer, I was really interested in the link between depression and mortality. When researching this topic, I discovered a rather large literature that showed that people who experience depression tend to die younger, on average, than those who do not. However, it wasn’t clear from prior research why, exactly, depressed people tend to die younger than those who are not. Though it makes sense that depression is linked with mortality, the reasons behind it remained a puzzle, and I thought it would make an interesting project.

Health care employment accounted for 10.74 percent of total employment in the United States in March, according to a report by the Altarum Institute. One out of every nine jobs was in the health care sector—an all-time high, the report says.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) March 2013 employment data show that health care employment rose by 23,000 jobs in March, and most were in ambulatory care. Health care has added 1.4 million jobs since the start of the recession in December 2007, the report says, while non-health employment has fallen.

The Altarum Institute is a nonprofit health systems research and consulting organization.

Read the report here.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows, alumni and grantees. Some recent examples:

RWJF/U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Physician Faculty Scholars alumnus Amal Trivedi, MD, MPH, is co-author of a study that finds older patients are routinely prescribed potentially harmful drugs, particularly in the South. Although the specific reasons for the regional differences are unknown, the researchers hypothesize factors like education, socioeconomic status, and access to quality medical care might be to blame, the New York Times Well Blog reports. NPR and Nurse.com are among the other outlets to report on the findings.

Fierce Healthcare reports on a study led by RWJF/U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Clinical Scholar Kelly Doran, MD, that finds frequent use of the emergency department at Veterans Health Administration facilities is often due to “severely compromised life circumstances,” rather than poor access to outpatient health care. The study raises questions about the degree to which increasing access to outpatient care, as the Affordable Care Act aims to do, will reduce emergency department use.

Manish K. Sethi, MD, a health policy associate at the RWJF Center for Health Policy at Meharry Medical College, spoke to the Leaf Chronicle about a program he started at Cameron College Prep Middle School in Nashville to teach teens conflict resolution strategies in an effort to reduce violence in the Nashville area. Read a Q&A with Sethi about the program.

Sammy Zahran, PhD, is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health & Society Scholar (2012 - 2014). He is assistant professor of demography in the Department of Economics at Colorado State University, assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology in the Colorado School of Public Health, and co-director of the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University. This blog is based on his study: "Linking Source and Effect: Resuspended Soil Lead, Air Lead, and Children's Blood Lead Levels in Detroit, Michigan."

RWJF Health & Society Scholars lead the field of environmental health. This is part of a series highlighting their 2013 research.

Human Capital Blog: Tell us about your recent study, published in Environmental Science and Technology. What questions did you set out to answer? And what did you find?

Sammy Zahran: We sought to understand a mysterious statistical regularity in blood lead (Pb) data obtained from the Michigan Department of Community Health.  The dataset contained information on the dates of blood sample collection for 367,800 children (<10 years of age) in Detroit. By graphing the average monthly blood Pb levels (μg/dL) of sampled children, we found a striking seasonal pattern (see Figure 1). Child blood Pb levels behaved cyclically. Compared to the reference month of January, blood Pb levels were 11-14 percent higher in the summer months of July, August, and September.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

Asthmapolis, founded and directed by RWJF Health & Society Scholars alumnus David Van Sickle, PhD, MA, has secured a $5 million investment that will be used to expand operations and further enhance its product, the Milwaukee Business Journal  and Journal-Sentinel report. The company has engineered a GPS-enabled asthma inhaler called the Spiroscout, which sends a signal with the time and location to a remote server every time a patient uses it, allowing patients and providers to track and analyze the onset of asthma symptoms. Read more about Asthmapolis here and here.

Health & Society Scholar Sammy Zahran, PhD, is co-author of a study that finds that children in Detroit are being exposed to lead from an overlooked source: contaminated soil. Zahran and his team examined seasonal fluctuations in children’s blood lead levels and found that levels were highest in the summertime, when contaminated soil turns into airborne dust. The researchers were able to rule out exposure to lead-based paint as the main source of the contamination, NPR’s Shots Blog reports, because blood lead levels were lower in the winter, when children are more likely to be indoors.

A study from the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, which is directed by RWJF Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research recipient Edward W. Maibach, PhD, MPH, finds a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents think action should be taken to address climate change, United Press International reports. The New York Times Dot Earth Blog also reported on the findings.

This is part of the April 2013 issue of Sharing Nursing's Knowledge.

Survey of Nurses: Hospitals’ Patient Safety Programs Lacking

A new survey of hospital nurses in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China finds that nurses lack confidence in their hospitals’ safety programs.

The online survey, conducted by a research firm for the American Nurses Association (ANA) and GE Healthcare, included 500 respondents from the United States and 200 each from the United Kingdom and China. Each country's responses were given equal weight in the final results. Among the findings:

• Ninety-four percent of nurses report that their hospitals have programs in place that promote patient safety, but only 57 percent believe those programs are effective.
• Just 41 percent describe their hospital as “safe.”
• Ninety percent of nurses believe it is important that nurses not be penalized for reporting errors or near misses, but 59 percent agree that nurses often hold back in reporting patient errors in fear of punishment (67 percent in the United States, 62 percent in the United Kingdom, and 49 percent in China). Sixty-two percent agree that nurses often hold back in reporting near misses for the same reason (69 percent in the United States, 65 percent in the United Kingdom, and 54 percent in China).
• Thirty-three percent of nurses said that "poor communication among nurses at handoff" has increased the risk of patient safety incidents in their hospitals in the past 12 months. Thirty-one percent said "poor communication with doctors" has also increased the risk of patient safety incidents.

Around the country, print, broadcast and online media outlets are covering the groundbreaking work of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leaders, scholars, fellows and grantees. Some recent examples:

A study led by RWJF/U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Clinical Scholars alumnus Jeffrey Kullgren, MD, MPH, finds that weight loss programs motivate patients to lose more weight when they offer financial prizes in group competitions, rather than individual rewards. MedPage Today and Medscape [registration required] report on the findings.

Healthcare Finance News reports on a study co-authored by RWJF Investigator Award in Health Policy Research recipient Mark A. Hall, JD, that finds insurers subject to the medical loss ratio requirements in 2011 spent less than one percent of premium revenue on quality improvements (0.74%) or rebates (0.35%). The researchers write that “current market forces do not strongly reward insurers’ investments in this area.”

In a post on the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog about prenuptial agreements, Investigator Award recipient Celeste Watkins-Hayes, PhD, writes: “There is no doubt that women need to be savvy about protecting their assets and ensuring that their contributions and hard work are valued, even in marriage. But prenups can only protect a certain demographic. What is needed is a comprehensive strengthening of all women’s safety nets through access to jobs that build wealth, increased financial literacy and a better infrastructure for raising children with or without a significant other.”