Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions
STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS -- (Senate - June 28, 2006)
By Mr. DURBIN (for himself and Ms. MIKULSKI):
S. 3588. A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to authorize capitation grants to increase the number of nursing faculty and students, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I would request the Chair to inform me when I have used 6 minutes of the 10 minutes I have requested.
We have a lot of bipartisan battles in the Senate. I am going to try to bring an issue to the consideration of the Senate and to their attention which I believe is very bipartisan. It affects the State of Alaska, the State of North Dakota, the State of Illinois, and the State of Maine. It affects us all. What I am speaking to is the shortage of nurses in America.
We face a critical shortage of nurses. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services looked at all of the licensed nurses and found that in the year 2000, this country was 110,000 nurses short of what was necessary to provide adequate health care. By 2005, the shortage had doubled to 219,000 nurses. By 2020, we will be more than 1 million nurses short of what is necessary to maintain quality health care in America.
To avoid this shortage which the Department of Health and Human Services projects, we have to substantially increase the number of nursing graduates and those entering the workforce each year. Just to replace the nurses who are retiring, we need to increase student enrollment by at least 40 percent. The baseline supply for nurses--as you can see on this chart--in our country, for the current time and through the year 2020, is on a steady downward flow, whereas demand goes up dramatically. If we had 90 percent more nursing graduates, we still would not reach the projected demand in America as baby boomers reach the point where they need help and many others need quality nursing.
The problem is that there are not enough teachers at schools of nursing. That is what it comes down to. Last year, nursing schools across America denied admission to 35,000 qualified students because there just weren't enough teachers.
In my home State of Illinois, schools of nursing are denying qualified students admittance because of the shortage of teachers. This is an indication here. These are B.A. and graduate nursing programs in Illinois. These are the enrollees and these are the numbers turned away. As you can see, from the year 2002 to the present time, we are up to 2000 potential nursing graduates who are turned away each year despite their qualifications because, sadly, we can't keep up with teaching them.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing surveyed more than 400 schools of nursing this last year. Two-thirds of the schools, represented by the blue part of this pie chart--69 percent reported vacancies on their faculty. An additional 15 percent said that they were fully staffed but still needed more faculty.
Statistics paint a bleak picture for the availability of nursing faculty now and into the future. Take a look at the age of full-time nursing faculty across America. Unfortunately, that reflects an older population now teaching in our nursing schools, soon to retire. The median age of a doctoral-prepared nursing faculty member in America is 52. The average age of retirement for faculty is 62. It is expected that 200 to 300 doctorally prepared faculty will be eligible for retirement each year from 2005 to 2012, reducing even more the faculty available to train the nurses we need.
We think help should be on the way, and it should start in the Senate. Our leader on the Democratic side of the aisle is Senator BARBARA MIKULSKI of Maryland. She has been the strong voice for nurses as long as she has served in the Senate. I am happy today to join her in introducing the Nurse Education Expansion and Development Act. The Act would provide schools of nursing with grants to hire and retain new faculty, purchase educational equipment, enhance clinical laboratories and expand and repair infrastructure. This bill would also require the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, to report on ways to increase participation in the nurse faculty profession.
Nurses care for our kids, our grandkids, our parents--people whom we love. We know the difference they make in everyone's life and increasingly we are noticing the difference when we do not have enough nurses, these dedicated men and women, when we need them the most. We must take deliberate action now to solve this critical health care problem. I urge all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this Mikulski-Durbin legislation. I think this is an important step in the direction toward quality health care for generations to come.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the text of the bill was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
S. 3588
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