Find out how many nurses Washington will need by 2030

A perfect storm of factors taken all together could leave the world short of nearly 5.7 million nurses by 2030, according to forecasts by Becker’s Hospital Review.

In the United States, issues contributing to this shortage include the baby boomer generation reaching retirement age, an increased need for health care as our population ages, a lack of skilled educators, and the pandemic. of COVID-19. As each state feels the effects of these factors, their intensity and the extent to which they will affect the supply of nurses vary widely.

NursingEducation.org used data from the Health Resources and Services Administration Health workforce simulation model, which is an integrated health professions projection model that estimates the current and future supply and demand of health care providers. The 2017 model, which is the most recent available, examines the demographics of current health care providers, current and projected population counts, and the state of the national economy and labor market.

For this story, states were ranked based on the projected surplus of RNs in 2030, which is the percentage change between the projected supply of nurses and the projected demand. A positive percentage means there is a projected surplus of nurses in 2030, and a negative percentage means there is a projected shortage of nurses. Any link is broken by the projected surplus of licensed practical nurses in …