The Changing Demographics of Nursing

The face of cargon for has been changing over the last 50 years. Women who a half a century ago would only ply as nannys until they married are now ending up as nursing managers and administrators, moving out of the practical field. . But still it has been historied that the age of the nursing custody has increased over the last take up of a century, and fewer younger people are entering the nursing profession.In fact, at the time of the survey by the Bureau of health Professions in 1997, baby boomers (those born between 1947 and 1962) were the largest comp angiotensin-converting enzyment of the nursing workforce and at the current time only nine percent of registered treasures are younger than 30 years of age (Santucci, 2004). If this trend continues, then it would intend that the need for nursing would increase by as a lot as 22% between the years of 1998 and 2008. The demographics of nursing are changing as to the working environment as intimately. period hospitals emplo y about 60% of all entertains, the nurses who work in hospitals are likely to be younger, largely due to the strain of physically demanding work and the shift work involved. While the hospitals tend to produce recruiting broadcasts more focused on younger nurses, this similarly means that there is the need to promote relationships between the different generations of nurses. Problems in workplaces are the most often sited issues when it comes to line turnover lays among nurses.And the pass of younger nurses toward the hospital setting also means that the number of fresh graduate nurses being hired into the nursing pool is getting higher. This in turn results in a greater number of rather unpracticed sensitive nurses in positions that may be better filled by experienced nurses. In order to answer this line, residency course of studys have been essential for new-fangled graduate nurses, to provide orientation to the specialty areas much(prenominal) as critical care, medi cal/surgical and psychiatry. These residency designs appear to do much to help the new nurses address the challenges they face in their new positions. park and Puetzer (2002) clearly define in their article the issues surrounding the impressiveness of rough-and-ready recruitment, efficient training and ultimate retention of experience nursing staff. A structured mentoring and precepting program appears to be key to all three of these issues and shows that succession the schools prepare the nurses for the basics, mentoring programs are the most effective in the workplace. Without residency programs, there is a significant degree of turnover in the nursing staff, which leads to light clinical are and burnout.A information by Bowles and Candela in 2005 re supposeed involved the experiences of recent RN graduates in their first jobs (Bowles and Candela, 2005). The study was meant to stipulate new graduate perceptions of first jobs and why they left them, if they had. The results showed that 30% of new graduates left their positions in spite of appearance one year, and 57% had left their first positions within 2 years. Issues cited for leaving consisted of long-suffering care problems, unsafe nurse to patient of ratios, and stress associated with the acuity of the patients.Other significant issues (22%) noted a lack of support on the part of management, as well as a lack of guidance and a sensation of being given also much responsibility for patient care as compared to the nurses level of relieve and experience. This review showed that RNs in the first year of work tend to get out their first position at a much higher rate than RNs who are in second or subsequent positions. It would appear from this study that to improve RN retention one must consider the phylogenesis of orientation and mentoring programs.This would improve work environments and reduce stress levels. in that respect is a limited availability of preceptors. This often causes nurse in terns multiple preceptor assignments that causes problem with educational continuity, follow through on assignments and progress assessments, as well as preceptor burnout. Smith and Chalker (2005) describe the issue from the nurse interns view where all active duty military nurses assign to a military hospital between December 2000 and November 2003 were surveyed.A total sample of 216 nurse interns were surveyed regarding the nurse interns perception of the preceptor continuity within the existing four-month nurse intern program. These nurses were also asked about differences in perception between clinical performance, role transition, job satisfaction and nursing retention issues among nurse interns who had the homogeneous preceptor throughout their 4-month internships as compared to those who did not.In this study, there appeared to be no difference reported in the clinical performance, role transitions and retention in nursing between nurse interns who had assigned clinical pr eceptors versus those who did not. Over 48% of those surveyed indicated that the presence of one or multiple preceptors had little to do with the nurses desire to stay within the nursing profession. It is important, however, to note that of those who were surveyed who were new graduates, of these respondents 85% matt-up that having the same preceptor was most beneficial.Some supporting comments included issues such as building a trusting bond with the preceptor, consistency and continuity, and bureau building. Another interesting study assessed the effectiveness of using a mentorship program not only to retain quality nurses, provided also to genuinely recruit them to programs in the first place. In this study (Nelson and Godfrey, 2004) identified that the new graduate nurse population required special attention, quoting that one in every three nurses under the age of 30 planned to take leave their current job within the year (Aiken, et. l. 2001).Understanding this effect of p atient care continuity, Nelson and Godfrey set out to see if a nurse mentorship program designed to provide an intense experience for students to gain greater clinical skills, and work values that would lead to commitment to professional teams and hopefully job retention. This study included nursing students who were within 2 semesters of graduation from a local program in Florida.All candidates for the program were prescreened and required a completed application as well as two garner of reference before they would be accepted into the program. Students in this study worked with assigned preceptors for a minimum of 16 hours with each two-week period, mentoring one on one with an experienced RN. It is interesting to note that ten of the students are now graduated, and hang in employed by the hospital at which they precepted.It is likely that the selection mould weeded out those applicants who most likely would be in benefit of a preceptor program, perhaps the more clinically inse cure RN or the one who is struggling with assimilating clinical decision making skills and the like. There was benefit to the students in that they all felt better prepared for approach into employment as an RN. The benefit to the hospital also cannot be denied. As noted in the study, savings related to RN retention continues to accrue. utilise the assumption that the 62 graduate nurses who did not participate in the program had participated, and applying the hospitals 23% turnover rate applied to this hypothetical group, this would mean a net savings of 14 nurses (instead of the 29 they would have lost without the program, check to previous rates of turnover). Assuming that the cost of mentorship for each RN would be approximately $10,000, and then the savings would be around $150,000 to the hospital ground on nurse retention alone.This study would seem to indicate that the nurse mentorship program not only improves nurse clinical skills and job satisfaction, but also can be of monetary savings to the hospitals themselves. While relatively few articles available on mentorship for graduate nurses exist, there are complete valid studies out there which all seem to indicate the importance of orientation programs not only to improve clinical care, but to abate nursing staff turnover, preceptor burnout and decrease the financial burden such turnover costs to the healthcare system.