Is this the year that the great nursing shortage will come to an end? I mean, look at all the great stuff people are doing to solve it. I’ve been blogging about it all year. They’re giving out loans to triple PhDs who want to study the causes of the nursing shortage as though its a subject never before explored by the hands of an academian; they’re developing fancy new fangled abbreviated nursing programs that will turn out nurses at maximum speed (never mind that the time they spend learning anything is curtailed but we’re looking for bodies not brains); they’re still “looking” at ways to increase the number of nursing instructors (never occured to them to offer more money or incentives); and the busy little beavers are rapidly opening up new programs or expanding exisiting ones. Whew, progress, huh.

Oh, how could I forget scholarships and the nurse reinvestment program. And trying to brainwash 3rd graders into becoming nurses. And developing websites like Discovernursing.com, where you can read quotes from nurses who say, “I get to be me as a nurse. That certainly tells you a lot about the nuts and bolts of nursing, doesn’t it? I mean, I would hate to think that you had to become someone else.

Well, then that solves it. We can look forward to a nurse abundant 2007.