Will nursing workforce weather retirement of baby boomers?

More than a decade ago, forecasters predicted shortages exceeding 500,000 RNs beginning in the middle of the current decade, as baby boomers retire and are replaced by smaller cohorts of RNs.

After these forecasts were made, enrollment in nursing schools doubled. The implications of this change have not been fully explored.

In this study, researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee; Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, forecast the size and age distribution of the nursing workforce to the year 2030 and compare it to demand recently projected by the Health Resources and Services Administration.

They found that annual retirement of RNs from the workforce will accelerate from 20,000 a decade ago to 80,000 in the next decade, and they project that the RN workforce will increase from 2.7 million in 2013 to 3.3 million in 2030.

This increase in workforce size, which was not expected a decade ago, is contingent on new entry into nursing continuing at its current rate. Even then, supply will fall short of demand by 128,000 by 2025, the authors say.

—Auerbach D I, Buerhaus P I, Staiger D O. Will the RN workforce weather the retirement of the baby boomers? Med Care. 2015;53(10):850-856.

http://journals.lww.com/lww-medicalcare/Abstract/2015/10000/Will_the_RN_Workforce_Weather_the_Retirement_of.3.aspx