Aims and objectives Essay

This paper provides a context for this special variation. It highlights the scale of the contend of accommodate paucitys, alone also makes the point that there is a indemnity agenda that provides workable solutions.ResultsAn overview of nursepopulation ratios in variant countries and regions of the world, highlighting considerable variations, with Africa and South East Asia having the lowest average ratios. The paper argues that the deficit of nurses is not necessarily a shortage of individuals with nursing qualifications, it is a shortage of nurses volitioning to work in the present conditions. The causes of shortages are multi-faceted, and there is no single ball-shaped measure of their extent and nature, there is growing grounds of the impact of relatively low plying aims on wellness care delivery and outcomes. The main causes of nursing shortages are highlighted inadequate workforce planning and storage allocation mechanisms, resource constrained undersupply of new staff, poor recruitment, retention and return policies, and inefficacious use of available nursing resources through inappropriate skill mix and utilisation, poor incentive structures and inadequate career support.ConclusionsWhat now faces policy makers in Japan, Europe and other developed countries is a policy agenda with a core of commonplace themes. First, themes related to addressing supply side issues getting, tutelage and keeping in touch with relatively scarce nurses. Second, themes related to dealing with consume side challenges. The paper concludes that the main challenge for policy makers is to develop a co-ordinated package of policies that provide a long term and sustainable solution.relevancy to clinical coifThis paper highlights the impact that nursing shortages has on clinical practice and in health service delivery. It outlines scope for addressing shortage problems and consequently for providing a more positive staffing environment in which clinical pract ice bear be delivered.Keywords nurses, nursing, workforce issues, workforce planning Go to creative activityThe world has entered a critical period for human resources for health. The scarcity of dependant health personnel, including nurses, is cosmos highlighted as one of the biggest obstacles to achieving health system effectiveness. In January 2004, the High Level Forum on the Health Millennium education Goals (MDGs) penninged, There is a human resources crisis in health, which demand be desperately addressed (High Level Forum on the Health MDGs, 2004, p. 4). Later in the same year, the Joint Learning Initiative reported that There is a massive global shortage of health workers (Joint Learning Initiative 2004 executive summary, p. 3). In 2006, the valet de chambre Health Organisation devoted the whole of the World Health Report to the negative impact that human resources shortages was having on global health care (WHO 2006).Against this backdrop of growing concern about shortages of health personnel, this paper thinkes on one of the most critical components of the workforce nurses. As such, it provides a context for the other papers in this special edition of the Journal of Clinical Nursing. These other papers focus in incident on specific nurse workforce issues and priorities facing policy makers and researchers in Australia, Canada, Japan, the USA and elsewhere. They emphasise the need to develop a better instinct of the specific dynamics in organisational and country take nursing repel markets if policy makers are to be well informed about the judgements they must make about what will be effective policy solutions for the nursing workforce. This paper provides a broader perspective, highlighting the scale of the challenge of nursing shortages, but also making the point that there are many common challenges and a policy agenda that points to workable solutions.Go toNursing and the global health workforce challengeWHO has estimated there to be a tot of 592 million fulltime paid health workers worldwide in 2006, of which about two thirds were health service providers, with the remaining third being composed of health management and support workers (WHO 2006).WHO also calculated a threshold in workforce density below which consistent insurance coverage of essential interventions, including those necessary to meet the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), was very un presumable. found on these estimates, it reported that there were 57 countries with critical shortages equivalent to a global deficit of 24 million doctors, nurses and midwives. The proportional shortfalls were superior in sub-Saharan Africa, although numerical deficits were very gargantuan in sou-east Asia because of its population size (WHO 2006, p. 12). WHO also highlighted that shortages often coexist in a country with large numbers of unemployed health professionals Poverty, imperfect hugger-mugger labour markets, lack of public fund s, bureaucratic red tape and political interference produce this paradox of shortages in the midst of underutilized talent (WHO 2006, p. xviii).WHO cogitate that the shortage crisis has the potential to deepen in the coming years. It noted that entreat for service providers will escalate markedly in all countries mysterious and poor Richer countries face a future of low fertility and large populations of elderly people, which will cause a shift towards chronic and degenerative diseases with high care demands. Technological advances and income growth will require a more specialised workforce even as needs for rudimentary care increase because of families declining capacity or willingness to care for their elderly members. Without massively increasing training of workers in this and other wealthy countries, these growing gaps will exert even greater pressure on the outflow of health workers from poorer regions (WHO 2006, p. xix).Nurses are the main professional component of the f ront line staff in most health systems, and their contribution is recognised as essential to meeting development goals and delivering safe and effective care. One difficulty in making an accurate global estimate of numbers of nurses is the definition ofnurse. Different international agencies, at different times, have developed different definitions, some related to educational level, some to years of training. The primary focus of this paper is on registered nurses, but this focus is hampered by the absence of a clear definition for some data sources, and the overall lack of a single universal definition of nurse. To give one recital of the size of the nursing workforce world wide, the International Council of Nurses reports 129 national nurses associations representing 13 million nurses worldwide (ICN 2007).This section of the paper provides an overview of nursepopulation ratios in different countries and regions of the world. The data must be used with caution. The country level data collated by WHO which is reported in this paper whitethorn in some countries include midwives under the broad category of nurses for some, it is also likely that the data may include auxiliary and unlicensed personnel. There can also be varying interpretations relating to the calculation of the number of nurses some countries may report working nurses, others may report all nurses that are qualified to practice some may report headcount, others may report full time equivalents. The analysis presented below should therefore be interpreted as illustrative of a broad pattern of regional variations, earlier than an accurate representation of each country. Current initiatives by international organisations such as WHO, ILO and OECD to agree to standard definitions and improve the collection of country level HRH data should improve the current unsatisfactory situation.