New Study Suggests that the Nursing Shortage Varies by Location

By Richard Shank

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany Center for Health Workforce Studies have concluded that a better understanding of, and more effective planning to, handle the nursing shortage is possible. Their analysis indicates that the intensity of the nursing shortage differs from location to location and that, even in a state where the nursing shortage is acute, some locations (primarily urban) actually have an oversupply of nurses.

Based at a state university in New York, these researchers set out to examine the nature and scope of the nursing shortage in their state by developing an approach that measures the supply of nurses on a county-by-county basis (and in some cases, groups of counties) and comparing them to the predicted demand for nurses in those areas.

Using data from 2005, the available supply of nurses in each county was calculated in the following way: The researchers constructed counts of nurses entering the workforce through graduation from a nursing education program or by in-migration from another geographical area. Then, they constructed counts of nurses who exited the workforce through attrition (because of career changes, retirement, death, or out-migration to another geographical area). Finally, those two measures were merged together to calculate the available supply of nurses and then compared to the predicted demand for Registered Nurses (RNs) in each county.

The analysis begins with an examination of the overall RN supply in New York State, followed by regional and county level analyses. The regional and county level data provided a much more comprehensive picture of the nursing shortage than was previously available for the state. From this study, they were able to demonstrate that blanket estimates used to calculate the state level nursing shortages are not reliable and that more detailed assessments of the nursing shortage for policy making purposes can be made by tracking the shortage county-by-county.

The researchers also found that some primarily urban areas are well-supplied and even oversupplied with nurses, while their rural surrounding regions are facing acute shortages. To add to this complexity, they found that this trend did not hold true for every region of the state and that not all urban areas are well-supplied with nurses. Thus, variations in the supply of nurses within and between regions need to be carefully considered when planning state-level responses to the nursing shortage.

The type of analysis provided by this research should be built upon in each state since it demonstrates the need and possibility of more successfully targeting specific locations in need of educational development and employee recruitment assistance.

For more information, you can directly download the report here. Or you the report is available at the Center’s website http://chws.albany.edu/.

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