The nursing workforce and nursing education - An overview of trends

Projecting nursing's future requires understanding both the health care environment and the current state of the nursing profession. The authors provide a broad overview of trends in registered nurses' (RNs') demographic characteristics, employment patterns, and educational attainment. As the health care system has expanded over the past five decades, so has the size of the RN workforce, but it remains a workforce in which racial minorities and males are underrepresented, and appears to be aging faster than the rest of the professional workforce. Although the nursing profession has moved somewhat out of the hospital setting, nearly two out of three nurses remain in that setting, and their future employment patterns depend on what strategies hospitals pursue and how successful they are in that pursuit. Hospital-based diploma programs once dominated the educational scene but have now all but disappeared. The past twenty years have seen phenomenal growth in the associate-level training that now is the predominant pathway to entry-level practice in nursing. These same two decades have witnessed significant growth in advanced-level training for nursing professionals. The information presented in this chapter grounds the discussion of nursing's future in subsequent chapters.