With the growing elderly population of the United States and the lower birth rate, we are looking at an inverted population pyramid, (a population pyramid states that the elderly population should be the small minority of the population group, and there are more young people than elderly people). With this growing population in the United States, more healthcare facilities such as nursing homes and clinics are getting busier and increasingly understaffed. This is why more students should take nursing programs/classes in school.
As a student of the certified nursing assistant program of Palatine High School, I’ve seen the amount of assistance that elderly people should regularly receive whether or not they are being taken care of by a health care professional, or their families. Despite the fact that American health care is among the best in the world, it’s terribly understaffed by the amount of stress it generates on nursing or medicine students.
“The demand is so high but there just aren’t enough seats,” Long Beach city college dean of education Paul Creason said. “It’s critical to supply the workforce to meet the need, but there are too many obstacles and this will have ramifications for the cost and quality of health care.”
It’s clear that the need for supply for the medical workforce has plummeted with the growing demand for nurses. However, that allows new opportunities for many teenagers to find a career after High School and work with little competition especially due to other specialties that are very demanding such as business or law.
Not only is the nursing shortage of the United States an opportunity for students that would otherwise not be able to enter into nursing, but it can be a higher salary job in general. Without nurses, hospitals lose a large number of employees, causing them to increase the wage for nurses in hopes of hiring more nurses into the hospital. This can lead to a moderate increase of employment and increase in experienced nurses in hospitals without losing the relatively small competition for health care providers.
“According to the U.S Bureau of Labor statistics, nurse practitioners should see a 46% increase in jobs, or 135,500 new positions, between 2023 and 2033,” finance reporter Jamila Adam said. “The median annual salary for nurse practitioners tops six figures, clocking in at $126,260 in 2023, it ranks the No.1 best STEM jobs.”
Despite what Paul Creason and professional nurses say, there are negatives regarding nursing itself such as stress in students and disgust with very personal patient contact. However, taking nursing classes does help in learning more about health care and how to take care of people in various ways. Compassion and empathy are virtues commonly associated with nursing and without a doubt, a nurse should have these qualities.
It’s for these reasons that High School students should take more nursing classes, since it can fill in the gap of employment in the nursing field. It can also assist struggling students who would not be able to enter the workforce after college while also dealing with the increasing number of American seniors who would otherwise not have a provider available for them.
