Political Quotes

“my second degree amendment reflects my belief that we cannot continue to import nurses from other countries without also taking steps to step up capacity for training nurses here in the U.S. We all know that the United States faces a serious shortage of qualified nurses. Projections show that by the year 2020, our country will fall short of the nurses we need by one million nurses. Why do we have this looming shortage? Certainly it is due in part to our growing and aging population. But there are also structural problems with the domestic nursing system that limit the number of nurses we educate and train in this country. The main structural problems are an insufficient number of nurse educators and a shortage of clinical space for training. An American Association of Colleges of Nursing survey showed that nursing colleges denied admission to nearly 43,000 qualified applicants in 2006 academic year. The top reasons these applications were not accepted were insufficient faculty and not enough admissions slots. This is a bottleneck that is stifling the supply of nurses in this country. And we need to fix it. We need to devote resources to training and hiring new nursing faculty and expanding clinical space for nursing schools so they can accept more qualified students. These investments will exponentially increase the number of trained American nurses.”