Data Gaps Could Hinder Efforts to Educate Enough Nurses to Meet Demand

Although changing demographics and shifts in health care delivery will increase the demand for registered nurses (RNs), baccalaureate nursing schools are not filling available seats. Further, reporting and data collection anomalies preclude accurately counting the numbers of available seats and qualified nursing school applicants to baccalaureate programs. In other words, neither the precise supply of nursing school seats nor the demand for them is known. Without high quality nursing education data, it is difficult to determine whether there is a lack of qualified applicants to nursing schools, a lack of available seats (lack of capacity) for qualified applicants, difficulty predicting the size of the new entering class (inaccurate enrollment forecasting), or some combination of these challenges. Accurate nursing education data are vital to understanding trends in the nursing workforce, including whether the projected supply of nurses will be adequate to meet demand, and will be adequately trained in line with the Institute of Medicine’s goal that 80 percent of nurses have a baccalaureate degree by 2020. Additional research and improvements in data quality are needed to clarify nursing education supply and demand issues, causes, and solutions. Addressing the national- and state-level data gaps identified in this brief will ensure that efforts to meet the demand for baccalaureate-prepared RNs are data-driven, have appropriate goals, and use resources efficiently.