The current ‘lull’ in the nursing shortage is international but short-term and the shortage will return worse than ever, says the American past president of the international Honour Society of Nursing.
California State University-Chico nursing professor Carol Huston was the keynote speaker at last month’s inaugural NZ College of Primary Health Care Nurses NZNO conference in Auckland.
Until November last year she was the president of the Honour Society of Nursing which has 400,000 members across 90 countries and society chapters in 22 countries (but not New Zealand).
The author of a number of books on her specialty area, nursing leadership, Huston addressed the conference on preparing nursing leaders for 2020.
Huston told Nursing Review the drop in nursing vacancies being experienced in New Zealand was happening elsewhere around the world because of the recession.
“So many part-time nurses went to work full-time and so many nurses who were due to retire put off retirement, so the end result is an artificial bubble in the shortage,” Huston said.
She said despite the huge shortage looming the world had new graduates struggling to get jobs through hiring freezes in many hospitals, which she believed was shortsighted as employers would be begging to get those nurses when the recession was over.
Huston said one of the key issues for nursing in 2020 would be leadership succession planning because the ageing workforce would not only need replacing at the bedside but also in nursing management.
She said there was a strong need for more organised leadership training, management development and particularly mentoring.
“Mentoring is something that doesn’t cost anything and is a very effective way of promoting nurse leadership.” She said sometimes nursing, as a predominantly female profession, had not done the mentoring that the more male-oriented professions had.
She said the research literature showed mentoring was critical for leadership development as it provided role-modelling to new nurses.
Huston said her address to the Auckland conference looked at the skills nurses would need in the next 10 years, particularly with the new technology coming on board in nursing – from therapeutic robots to patient simulators. She said nurses really needed to be at the forefront of those changes so technology was used to supplement nursing practice rather than replace it.
Multidisciplinary health care would also be a major part of health care in a decade, said Huston. “And I hope that nurses will be leaders of that team but yet in many countries... physicians, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and other health professionals now have an educational entry level that exceeds nursing,” said Huston, who believed this was of concern.
On the international front Huston said the Honour Society had been working with the World Health Organisation to introduce basic standards for initial nurse education. She said a number of countries currently did not have a registration or licensing system for nurses. So ensuring basic international standards for nursing education was a significant issue and the WHO document – while lacking teeth – was important as it was the first of its kind.
Huston said the entry level required for nursing also varied globally. She had spent time in China and said most nurses there were graduating at 17 so certainly were not getting the background in sciences and higher education required for autonomous practice.
