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What is nursing? 
The profession of nursing has as its essence, assisting people to attain and maintain optimal health and to cope with illness and disability. The nurse functions as a caring professional in both autonomous and collaborative roles, using critical thinking, ethical principles, effective communication, and deliberative action to assist people with health related self care, facilitate access to health care and aid in decisions about health.

Why a Baccalaureate Degree in Nursing when there are shorter programs for RNs?
Rapid change and mounting complexities in health care have increased the need for Registered Nurses educated at the Baccalaureate level. The combination of liberal arts and distinctive nursing courses in community health, research and management result in a nurse with more diverse thinking, greater cultural awareness and broader socialization. The professional nurse with a Baccalaureate Degree in Nursing is prepared to work in all nursing practice settings, with healthy as well as ill people. The Baccalaureate graduate is also prepared for graduate education as entry into Advanced Practice Nursing roles such as Nurse Anesthetists, Nurse Midwives, and Nurse Practitioners.

What is the future for employment opportunities?
Despite 2.5 million RNs in the US, a shortage exists in nurses with needed specialties, skills and experience. Hospital recruitment efforts to reverse the shortage include big sign-on bonuses, salary increases and tuition reimbursement plans.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that jobs for RNs will grow 23 percent by 2006. That's faster than average for all other occupations.

In the year 2000, the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services projected there were 596,000 RNs with a BSN, with a need for 854,000. Unlike the shortage of the 1980s, this one is not about sheer numbers of nurses as much as having nurses with the needed specialties, skills and experience. Nurses are in particular demand if they can lead multi-disciplinary teams, serve as patient educators and managers of care across the continuum, or demonstrate a high level of skills in operating, recovery and emergency room, all types of critical care units, pediatrics and labor & delivery.

Experts are finding this shortage to be uniquely serious because it is a shortage of both supply and demand. It combines a wide range of issues that include: steep population growth in some states, a diminishing pipeline of new students into nursing, an aging workforce of RNs, a baby boom bubble that will require intense health care services just as a majority of nurses are retiring, and a broadening of job opportunities within health care. (data provided by Sigma Theta Tau, International, July 1999)