There is a race that is brewing between millenials who are becoming registered nurses and the hiring that has started at U.S. hospitals. A Health Affairs study concluded that Millennials are becoming registered nurses at nearly twice the rate of baby boomers, but that still won’t necessarily prevent a nursing shortage as boomers retire. The number of younger RNs nearly doubled to 834,000 in 2015, after dropping to 440,000 in 2000 when Generation Xers were joining the workforce.
But are hospitals hiring? We analyzed the data in the Public Insight Staffing and Physicians Interactive which is based on data from the AHA Annual Survey Database™. As it turns out hospitals are reporting 50% more vacancies from 2013 to 2015 after virtually no change from 2011 to 2013. The following graph shows this trend.