Wars don’t only cause destruction; they can also birth new ideas. During the 1854 the… Wars don’t only cause destruction; they can also birth new ideas. During the 1854 the Crimean War, the nursing profession became defined and standardized. Florence Nightingale, “The Lady with the Lamp,” was a nurse treating the wounded during the war. Her treatment concepts became the groundwork for forming hospital-based training programs, the earliest nursing schools.

Less than two centuries later, nursing schools are facing an insurmountable predicament. There is undoubtedly a shortage of nurses: By 2025, the United States will have 260,000 registered nurses too few, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the national voice for nursing education programs. And the shortage in nursing faculty only exacerbates this problem.

Current nursing faculty across the country is aging, and entering nurse educators are not filling the widening gap left by retiring ones. Between 1993 and 2004, the mean age of faculty with a master’s degree increased from 46.0 to 49.2, and for faculty with doctorial degrees, the increase was from 49.7 to 54.3, according to the AACN.

Solutions must be reached in order to counter this trend, but these are not simple.

“There is a societal lack of recognition of the complexity of the nursing world,” said Patricia Benner, a nursing educator who gave a lecture at Pitt last Saturday, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Education programs, funding, licensure and a multitude of different issues make it complex, but there are some initial approaches to consider.

For one, online education offers one step toward solution. Getting a bachelor of science in nursing after becoming a registered nurse can be done through online colleges, which will not be limited by any faculty number. Likewise, the stepping stone from a BSN to a master of science in nursing is similar. Attaining a master’s is usually required to become an educator.

The education would be relatively affordable, would not require as many educators as the traditional classroom and would fit current RNs and BSNs into an educator position.

Online education would make the process easier, but a more direct solution would be to enhance the incentive to become a nursing educator.

People look for satisfaction in their occupations, and one criterion that seems to be common across the career spectrum is salary, and for a good reason. The average annual salary of a nursing educator, a position that requires graduate-level schooling, is $56,000, according to SimplyHired.com, an online job search engine. To compare, a nurse anesthetist, a nursing specialty also requiring graduate-level schooling, makes $78,000 per year.

This might explain why younger nurses prefer a clinical career to an academic one, leaving current educators as remaining faculty at hospitals and colleges. The solution for solving the nursing faculty shortage is complex, but an issue like salary follows a linear relationship. Increasing salary would probably act as another motivator for young nurses to enter academia.

This is an incentive that, in retrospect, would have been best addressed in the health care reform bill, now the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. With millions more insured, the country will be in dire need of hospital personnel soon.

Nurses are vital to the hospital and clinic, as are all members. However, nurses fuse that medium between the highly specialized physician and the most basic trained personnel — an enormous gap indeed. They started their history serving in wars, and they must be able to continue their service, if this country hopes to see a better standard of health care.