Tackling the Nursing Shortage: Which Roles Are Hardest to Fill and How to Guide Students in Nursing

Nursing shortages are everywhere. We hear about them in the news. Read about them in the paper. We may even experience them personally when we go to the hospital. Longer wait times in the doctor’s offices. Fewer people available to help guide your experience.

These are symptoms of nursing shortages. But where is the problem felt most acutely? What positions are hardest to fill?

In this article, we will take a look at how to alleviate the sting of nursing shortages, even in positions that don’t always generate a lot of interest.

What Qualities Make a Nursing Position Hard to Fill?

One might immediately jump to difficulty. That is a factor—but not necessarily in the way you are imagining. All nursing jobs are difficult. Some of them are just hard in ways that make people want to either not do them at all, or leave right away.

Jobs in that category are usually:

• Difficult to get started in: Certain nursing careers simply have a higher barrier to entry than others. If someone is busy working on a hospital floor—utterly exhausted already—they probably aren’t going to be interested in enrolling in graduate school, right? But that’s what it takes to become an informatics nurse or a Family Nurse Practitioner.

• Unsafe: Not everyone realizes that almost all nursing jobs come with a degree of personal risk. Nurses come into contact with all segments of the population. They also work with people in desperate circumstances. This combination of factors results in startling statistics: Virtually all nurses will experience workplace violence at some point in their careers. Some, like psychiatric nurses, experience it constantly.

Nurses are superheroes, but like everyone else, they want to feel safe at work. Jobs that put people in direct contact with physical or emotional abuse are naturally difficult to fill, but most shortages owe to less dramatic causes.

We will take a look at some of those in the next few headings.

Location

Let’s say you live in Hypothetical Small Town Indiana. It’s not such a bad place to live, is it? Step out on your front porch for a moment. Wow, look at that! The sort of historic downtown Main Street area you only see in Hallmark movies.

You know what that downtown area doesn’t have? A bunch of nurses walking around. Regardless of how charming a small town might be, small is ultimately going to be the operative word. A community of only a few thousand people could go five years without producing even one new nurse. And what happens if that nurse decides to take their talents elsewhere?

Rural nursing positions are notoriously difficult to fill for this exact reason. Hospitals work very hard to recruit people, but this is often easier said than done. Hypothetical Small Town Indiana might be paradise for you, but it’s an easy pass for an up-and-coming nurse who thinks of themselves more as a city mouse.

Experience

This consideration is tricky in that it is constantly in flux. Nurses working today actually probably have a better work experience than any generation previous to this. They also have different expectations.

Work/life balance standards are constantly shifting in a positive direction, but they aren’t always felt by nurses working twelve-hour shifts on Christmas.

Tricky, right? Because someone needs to be there. But eventually, a floor nurse may come to realize that they could work a different job and enjoy a much higher work/life balance.

They could become a different kind of nurse, or—and this is what most people do—leave the profession entirely.

Floor nurse positions are not difficult to staff in the same way that some of the other positions we have referenced to this point. For many people, this type of work is their first stop after graduation. Unfortunately, it is often their last stop as well.

The punishing shifts certainly are not the only culprit. Many people also experience a sharp difference between their expectations of nursing versus what it is actually like. In school, students receive only small doses of clinical work experience (though these experiences may not feel “small” at the time).

While these do serve as a good way to train for the job, they fail to fully capture the experiential complexity of healthcare work. What is it like to lose a patient? How does seeing constant pain and grief influence your worldview?

Until you’ve worked as a nurse for a while, you simply won’t have an answer to these questions.

What Can Be Done About Nursing Shortages?

While there is no magic bullet to cure the nursing shortage problem, there are steps that can be taken to improve the situation. Re-evaluating the accessibility barrier is a good place to start.

Naturally, this shouldn’t mean making it easier to become a nurse in an academic sense. High expectations are a good thing to have for healthcare workers.

Might it be possible, however, that steep college loans and professional stereotypes are turning people away?

Margret is smart and compassionate. She works hard and genuinely wants to make a difference in other people’s lives. She also doesn’t have parents who can help her pay for college. Does she want to borrow $100K to pursue a job that everyone seems to be leaving?

Jake is a young black man. He is also interested in healthcare work, but he has literally never even once seen a nurse who looked like him depicted in the media. Is it surprising that he concluded nursing was not for him?

For the former issue, grants and scholarships can help enormously. There are already many programs designed to make nursing school more affordable as a way of alleviating shortages. That said, there is always room for improvement.

What do we do about Jake? Healthcare employment disproportionately favors majority group members. If nursing jobs are to become more appealing to men and minorities, efforts will need to be made at the college recruitment level.

High school guidance counselors and college recruitment efforts can work together to add diversity to a profession that desperately needs it.

Fixing the nursing shortage problem is not easy, nor will it be fast. However, by making these positions more accessible, universities and hospitals can do a lot to encourage a new generation of healthcare workers.