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.

On Monday, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a program that will help military veterans who have health care experience or training pursue nursing careers. The Veterans’ Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program is expected to provide $3 million before the end of this fiscal year (September 30) to accredited schools of nursing to increase veterans’ enrollment, and provide mentorship and other support services.

“The Veterans’ Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program recognizes the skills, experience and sacrifices of our veterans, while helping to grow our nursing workforce,” Secretary Sebelius said in a news release.  “It helps veterans formalize their skills to get jobs, while strengthening Americans’ access to care.”

The funds will also be used to explore ways to award academic credit for prior military health care experience or training.

Read more about the new federal veterans/nursing program.

This blog post offers perspectives from seven Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Faculty Scholars who attended TEDMED 2013 last week.

Seeing things in new and different ways will advance nursing practice, research, and education.  We need to think of creative strategies to raze perceived boundaries. One way for nurses to enter new frontiers is to engage in interprofessional dialogue with consumers, health care providers, researchers, entrepreneurs, technology experts, designers, and artists. We experienced this interchange at TEDMED 2013—an interprofessional conference for sharing and exploring solutions to health care’s most pressing challenges.

Collaboration is Key
Adejoke Ayoola: The opportunities to explore new advances in technology and interact with innovators remind me of an African Proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” The outcome is more fulfilling with collaboration. By collaborating with stakeholders (e.g., community residents, community health workers, local agencies), research not only becomes more effective, it becomes more relevant to societal needs. Collaboration with my nursing colleagues promotes scholarly growth and may involve writing manuscripts or conducting smaller studies associated with a bigger study.

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:

A study led by RWJF Clinical Scholar Tammy Chang, MD, MPH, finds that women who had their first child before age 20 are more likely to be obese later in life than those who were not teen moms, Health Day reports. “When clinicians care for teen mothers, we have so many immediate considerations— child care, housing, school, social and financial support—that we may fail to consider the long-term health effects of teen pregnancy,” Chang said. Caroline Richardson, MD, a Clinical Scholars alumna, and Matthew Davis, MD, MAPP, an alumnus and program site co-director at the University of Michigan, co-authored the study with Chang.

RWJF Scholars in Health Policy Research alumnus Craig Volden, PhD, was a guest on MSNBC’s The Cycle to discuss his study published in the American Journal of Political Science. Volden and his colleagues examined the sponsorship histories of 140,000 bills introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives over the last 40 years, and concluded that female lawmakers may be more effective at passing legislation than their male counterparts, particularly during times of party polarization, because they tend to work across party lines.

A study led by RWJF Executive Nurse Fellows alumna Margaret Grey, DrPH, RN, FAAN, finds that Internet-based psycho-educational intervention programs improve outcomes for young patients entering adolescence with type 1 diabetes, Monthly Prescribing Reference reports.

Medical News Today and the MinnPost report on an article written by Gary Taubes, MSE, MS, recipient of an RWJF Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, in The British Medical Journal about the non-profit he co-founded, the Nutrition Science Initiative. The Initiative will fund nutrition and obesity research, which Taubes says has been flawed and inconclusive in the past. Learn more about the Nutrition Science Initiative.

President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget proposal recommends a $20 million increase over previous budget proposals for the Title VIII Nursing Workforce Development Programs, the primary source of federal funding for nursing education.

“With the proposed increase to Title VIII funding, the Obama administration continues to recognize the invaluable contribution that nurses make in the delivery of care and the need to strengthen our primary care system,” American Nurses Association (ANA) President Karen A. Daley, PhD, RN, FAAN, said in a statement.

According to the Center to Champion Nursing in America (CCNA), the $20 million increase will expand the pool of primary care Advanced Practice Registered Nurses through the Advanced Education Nursing Traineeship Program.  If enacted, and if the funding is sustained, the increase will produce an additional 1,800 primary care nurses over five years.

“The President's proposal to train 1,800 more primary care nurse practitioners would provide a much needed shot in the arm to our health care workforce,” said Winifred Quinn, MA, PhD, director of legislation and field operations at CCNA. “These new health professionals are key to boosting consumer access to primary and preventive care, and other innovative delivery system reforms we are counting on to improve quality and hold down costs.”

The ANA also applauded other health care investments in the budget, including funding for community health centers, new mental health programs, health reform implementation, medical research, and more.

Read ANA’s statement about the budget.
Learn more about Title VIII Nursing Workforce Development Programs.

This is part of a series introducing programs in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Human Capital Portfolio.

What policies optimize nurses' role in solving the shortage of primary care practitioners? What approaches will promote and incentivize interprofessional education and practice in health care so as to improve the quality and safety of care? What promising state and federal initiatives are likely to achieve the Institute of Medicine's recommendation to increase the proportion of nurses who hold a baccalaureate or higher degree to 80 percent by the year 2020?

These and other crucial issues confronting nursing and the health care system are the focus of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Charting Nursing’s Future policy briefs. Launched in 2005, the series now includes 20 briefs covering a range of topics, including:

• Unlocking the potential of school nursing;
• Expanding the nation’s capacity to educate nurses through state-level partnerships;
• Improving the recruitment and retention of older and experienced nurses as a way to stem the looming nursing shortage;
• Understanding the relationships among such issues as access, cost, payment systems,  and quality of care;
• Optimizing nurses’ role in closing the health care quality and safety “gap”;
• Addressing the nurse faculty shortage through public and private partnerships;
• Strengthening public health nursing;
• Driving policy change with data collected and analyzed by state nursing workforce centers;
• Easing the nursing shortage through government, school and employer collaborations; and more.

Margaret Wainwright Henbest, RN, MSN, CPNP, is executive director of the Idaho Alliance of Leaders in Nursing and co-lead of the Idaho Nursing Action Coalition. She served in the Idaho state Legislature from 1996-2008.

I stumbled into politics in the midst of my nursing career. After serving as a nurse practitioner (NP) for two years in California and Oregon, I moved to Idaho in 1986. But it wasn’t until after the move that I discovered that I could not practice in my new home state unless a physician recommended me to the Idaho Board of Medicine (IBM) for licensure. That was not the only barrier to practice: To get my license, I had to interview with the IBM and win its approval.

I took a faculty position instead. But I soon met NPs all across the state who were seeking a change to this restrictive licensing requirement. I somehow wound up as the spokesperson for our eventual legislative effort, which was defeated after its first Senate hearing in the early 1990s.

That experience taught me that if something needs to be done, if a law needs to be changed, no one is going to do it for you; you have to do it yourself. Since I had a part-time job, I had the time to get active in local nursing organizations, and one thing led to another. I was approached to run for office and, after deliberating with family and friends, decided to make the leap. I won by seven votes in 1996. Every vote counts!

When I arrived at the state Capitol, I found that my perspective as a nurse was extremely valuable, especially during health care debates. I recognized prior to running that nurses were educationally and intellectually prepared for public office, and that we had little if any self-serving agenda in health care reform debates. We had a legitimate altruistic interest in patient and community health. This was readily apparent to policy-makers and the public.

Have you signed up to receive Sharing Nursing’s Knowledge? The monthly Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) e-newsletter will keep you up to date on the work of RWJF’s nursing programs, and the latest news, research, and trends relating to academic progression, leadership, and other critically important nursing issues.  These are some of the stories in the April issue:

More Nurses Climbing Education Ladder
Over the last century, nursing education has shifted from hospital-based diploma programs to colleges and universities, which offer associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in research and practice. Today, enrollment in higher degree nursing programs is on the rise, according to a 2012 survey by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. Read about RWJF scholars who are continuing their education, and what the Institute of Medicine says about a more highly educated nursing workforce.

In Indiana, Physicians and Nurses Work Together to Transform Nursing
In the Indiana Action Coalition, the partnership between physicians and nurses runs deep. “Nursing can’t change health care alone,” co-lead Kimberly Harper says, and many doctors, pharmacists, and other professionals she works with agree—and are championing the effort to advance nursing because they believe it will ultimately benefit patients. Improving interprofessional education and collaboration is a top priority for the group.

RWJF Scholar Pioneers Innovative Program to Help Low-Income Elderly Age at Home
Sarah Szanton, PhD, CRNP, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and an RWJF Nurse Faculty Scholar, has developed a program that sends teams of nurses, occupational therapists, and “handymen” to the homes of low-income, frail elderly participants for 16 weeks. After an assessment of all functional areas, the participant decides on functional goals, such as taking a bath or walking to church, as opposed to medical ones, such as reducing blood sugar or blood pressure levels. The program is having extraordinary success, helping seniors age in place and saving taxpayers money.

See the entire April issue here. Sign up to receive Sharing Nursing’s Knowledge 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.