The bottleneck appears to be lack of faculty to teach new nurses. Predictably, the reason comes down to money:
Why would a master’s-educated nurse accept a job as a professor at a local college or regional university for $60,000 yearly when (s)he can potentially earn $80,000 to $100,000+ per year as a”¦[clinical practice nurse in] a large healthcare network?
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- The nursing shortage
- Why nurse practitioners and physician assistants will not solve the primary care shortage
- Nursing home care
- How to fix the primary care shortage
- Add Massachusetts as a physician-shortage state
- Are nurse unions using the H1N1 flu pandemic as a bargaining ploy?
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{ 7 comments }
My thoughts EXACTLY.
will they be satisfied making more than primary care docs or should they make as much as specialty docs? or more even, who knows?
There might be reasons to choose the less lucrative position: It might offer a less stressful job with more respect. In addition, it might offer an intellectual challenge and a more thoughtful and abstract take on the subject matter than one gets when ‘in the trenches’. Doesn’t always pay the bills, but still might satisfy a person.
After all, you might ask, why there are professors at all, given that business and other fields have traditionally yielded greater pay.
Anonymous- Maybe they’ll be satisfied when they make as much as many other lesser trained professionals do who have no one’s life as part of their job responsibility?
My un college educated son in law in construction with 7 years experience makes 8 dollars more per hour than I do with my college degree and 20 years of experience.
Jus sayin…..
The following article with regard to the “nursing shortage”,in Welkepedia, provides a very factual and pragmatic analysis of the same. The URL for the same is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nursing_shortage
if you can find work in construction that brings you more than 80-100k, than go for it, i say.
everyone can find examples of pay discrepancies that they view as unfair. what do you think a reasonable salary should be? to my mind, 80-100 is a very reasonable number for a nurse. if you have lost the joy in what you do and want to make more, then you should pursue those other avenues.
Perhaps they could make as much as engineering professors or maybe the football coach. Truth be told, I enjoy the pursuit of research and I am surprised that I actually get paid to “think about things”. However, I am in the minority — of the small number of nursing PhDs granted per year, I would guess that almost %50-%70 of them are not truly interested in being scientists or researchers.
Of course there is the whole fight about whether nursing is an actual academic discipline unto itself — most of my work could be considered epidemiology. Nevertheless, nursing professors are not really different from other professors in their desire for greater pay. You should hear some of the ranting from my colleagues in computer science.
My solution to the nursing crisis would be to publicly flog patients with abysmal lifestyle choices and then withhold publicly funded care to those that do not make positive changes. That way the burden on PCPs is somewhat relieved and the resulting fewer patients would alleviate the need for more nurses — as a PhD nurse I have the equations to prove my plan would work
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