Nursing and Health Care Reform

Efforts to expand health care access, improve quality and control costs will have limited effect without a focus on who is going to deliver value-added health care to more Americans, especially when shortages of health care providers already threaten delivery of care.

Legions of new, well educated nurses will be needed to provide the primary and preventive care, chronic care management and care coordination necessary to reduce waste and bring down costs while increasing access and quality.

Despite this need, in 2008, 50,000 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing programs due to lack of faculty and other resource constraints.

Fortunately, the tools to fix ensure a 21st Century nursing workforce are in our midst. These solutions cannot just produce more nurses, but rather a richly-skilled and well-integrated nursing workforce that is poised to meet the needs that the public and an evolving delivery system require. 

For more information on nursing and health care reform, visit aarp.org. 

Also view the Nusing Provisions in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act chart.