Action urgently needed as nurse shortage looms
HEALTH Workforce Australia has predicted that in the mediumto long-term future, Australia’s demand for nurses will significantly exceed supply.
It is anticipated that there will be a shortage of approximately 85,000 nurses by 2025 and 123,000 nurses by 2030.
These startling statistics indicate that in the very near future there will not be enough nurses to provide care for Australia’s rapidly growing population.
To make matters worse, the current nursing workforce is ageing. In 2015, approximately two in five nurses were aged 50 and over. Consequently, a significant number of experienced nurses with valuable knowledge and expertise will soon be leaving the workforce due to retirement.
Why is this a problem? Firstly, this is a contributor to the looming nursing shortage and secondly, the healthcare industry needs to be prepared to fill these gaps as a deficit in knowledgeable and experienced nurses is a threat to patient safety and quality of care.
The anticipated nursing shortage and imminent retirement of experienced nurses will have dire ramifications for our already overstretched and under-resourced healthcare system.
Nurses comprise the largest healthcare profession nationally and play a pivotal role in the provision of safe, highquality healthcare.
The key challenge for the Australian healthcare system is to ensure that the current and future nursing workforce can meet the emerging needs of an ageing population with complex health problems and increasingly high expectations of healthcare service delivery.
Human resource management has an important role to play in mitigating the consequences associated with the predicted nursing shortage.
Effective workforce planning is essential to support alignment of nursing supply with required demand by the Australian healthcare system to support a nursing workforce that is sustainable.
Put simply, workforce planning involves taking the steps now to ensure that organisations have the right people, in the right place, with the right skills, at the right time and at the right price.
As one research report suggests: “Human resource management needs to add real strategic value to the bottom line, diligently manage the employee-employer relationship, and effectively manage the shrinking workforce.”
It is essential that organisations have a strategic, longterm staffing plan including human resource activities from recruitment to the identification, attraction and retention of nursing employee talent, learning and development and career management.
The failure of human resource management to effectively plan for a diminishing workforce will result in losses in productivity and seriously undermine quality of care.
So how is your local healthcare organisation preparing for the predicted shortage of nurses? Human resource management needs to get this right. After all, our lives may depend on it.