Discuss the global nursing shortage and effective strategies for recruitment and retention

Global Nursing ShortageNameUniversity
1.0 Introduction
Nursing shortage is an issue which affects each and every country across the world. The worldwide shortage of nurses leads to helplessness and suffering among patients. This occurs mostly due to the inability of the available healthcare workforce to attend to the health needs of the patients. However, less is known on the global and regional causes of a receding professional and unprofessional nurse workforce CITATION Ros121 \l 1033 (Rosseter, 2012). According to projections, the nursing shortage situation is set to worsen significantly over the next two or so decades. If this is true, the present trends continue. In 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States prepared a report titled Projected Supply, Demand, and Shortages of Registered Nurses on nursing shortage. According to this report, the current shortage will continue to deepen since huge numbers of professional nurses are continually retiring from the nursing field compared to few nurses who continue to join the profession CITATION Hay12 \l 1033 (Hayes, et al., 2012).
2.0 Definition
To achieve the objective of this paper, a newly recruited Registered Nurse has been interviewed and a literature review performed using published sources mostly online peer reviewed journals, textbooks and nursing periodicals. Main search areas involved global nursing shortage, general international nursing, global nurse migration, world brain drain, and world health care related systems CITATION Mig10 \l 1033 (Breier, Wildschut, & Mgqolozana, 2010). Understanding the definition of the nursing shortage is crucial and very important. How can we define nursing shortage? For purposes of this paper, nursing shortage is defined as a situation where the demand for professional nurses is higher than the supply in the nursing industry. This is the current case in most of developing and developed world and especially in the United States CITATION CDC09 \l 1033 (CDC, 2009).
3.0 Global nurse shortage
It is argued that nursing shortage can be caused by a situation where we have fewer nurses who are very willing to work as professional nurses in the present conditions. This can either be absolute or relative. An absolute shortage of nurses can be said to be a situation where some or most skilled nurses are indeed not available for any specific vacancy in the nursing field CITATION Cla111 \l 1033 (Clark & Allison-Jones, 2011). For instance, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals outlines eight major objectives: eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empower women, reducing early child mortality, improving maternal health care, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other related diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development CITATION UN11 \l 1033 (UN, 2011). Thus sustained shortage of nurses can ...