October 13, 2017
The proportion of registered nurses with nursing bachelor’s degrees has climbed in recent years to 57 percent in U.S. acute care settings, but it’s not rising fast enough to reach a goal of 80 percent by the year 2020, researchers say.
“When more nurses have degrees, there’s a higher quality of care, lower mortality rate and better patient outcomes,” said lead author Chenjuan Ma of New York University’s Rory Meyers College of Nursing in New York City.
Nurses make up the largest healthcare workforce in the U.S., with 2.75 million registered nurses in 2014 and 1.6 million of these working in hospitals, the study team notes in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship.
National nursing groups are also debating the positives and negatives of requiring a bachelor’s degree in nursing for entry-level nursing positions, said IHPI member Olga Yakusheva, an economist at U-M's School of Nursing.
“Nurses and aspiring nurses ought not to misinterpret the upcoming nursing shortage to mean any kind of nurse will soon be in high demand,” Yakusheva told Reuters Health.
“If you want to be a nurse, you should be prepared to dedicate yourself to getting at least a baccalaureate nursing degree,” she said. “In this era of high technologies and informatics, nurses are expected to be highly-trained in all aspects of patient care and prepared to participate and lead in system-level decision making.”