Nurse Vacancies by Country 2024

On September 1, 2022, Nursing Times published an article titled: "Nurse vacancies reach record high of almost 47,000 in England." This headline wasn't surprising, but it was alarming as the number of vacancies had grown by over 20% in a single year.

England is not alone in facing a nursing shortage. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, there are not enough students enrolled in nursing programs to fill the expected number of vacancies in the US. Part of the problem is that the nurse shortage is impacting nursing schools: nursing programs that are unable to fill faculty positions must limit their student admissions as a result.

The struggle to educate enough qualified nurses is particularly worrying as the average age for an RN was 52 years old in 2020, indicating that many nurses could soon be ready to retire. One estimate puts the number of nurses who will retire over the next decade at 1 million. Making the situation worse is that the US population is shifting. As the number of people over the age of 65 increases, so will the need for more medical professionals, including nurses.

All of this would have put a strain on the US health system without the COVID-19 health crisis. The pandemic increased stress on both the health system and medical professionals. The stress of the increased load on the health system, combined with staffing shortages, has left nurses feeling exhausted and stressed. The workload has increased to such an extent that they are struggling to adequately balance caring for themselves, their families, and their patients. In one survey, 52% of nurses reported that they were considering resigning due to these conditions.

Worldwide, there were as many as 30.6 million nurse and midwife vacancies in 2019, and the problem has only worsened since the COVID-19 Pandemic. The problem isn't only the number of vacancies, but how to ethically fill them. Historically, many Western countries, such as the UK and the US, have supplemented their nursing staff with nursing graduates from countries in the developing world. The problem is that many of these countries are now facing their own nursing shortages. Further complicating the problem, however, these migrant nurses often send money home to support their families, impacting the economies of those countries. For example, this makes up almost 10% of the national GDP in the Philippines.