Nursing, the nation’s largest health care profession, is in critical condition. The U.S. faces a shortfall of more than 78,000 full-time registered nurses this year alone, and California’s projected nursing workforce gap is among the largest. Nurses are fleeing the profession for familiar reasons: an aging workforce, high turnover and burnout that began long before the COVID pandemic and only deepened after it. But an overlooked cause of this crisis isn’t at the bedside — it’s in the classroom.
We don’t have enough educators to train new nurses, and Washington’s recent funding cuts will make that shortage even worse — especially here in California.
While Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers have taken steps to support nursing education, recent federal actions have weakened this progress. Congress dealt the first blow to nurse educators by slashing $46.8 million from Nursing Workforce Development Programs. That cut eliminated both the Nurse Faculty Loan Repayment Program and the Nursing Workforce Diversity Program…