How does the Nurses & Midwives e-cohort Study help the professions?
The Nurses & Midwives e-cohort Study is the first of its kind to examine factors associated with recruitment and retention in both undergraduate programs and within the nursing and midwifery professions. A predicted shortage of 40,000 nurses in Australia by 2010 (DEST 2002) and an estimated world wide shortfall of health workers of 4.25 million (WHO 2005) limits the capacity of health care systems to provide effective services in the acute, community and aged care settings. It has been estimated that New Zealand will require an 11% increase in the health workforce by 2011 to simply maintain existing practitioner-population ratios (NZIER 2004). Improved recruitment and retention rates are critical to managing the current workforce scarcity and for assuring there are sufficient nurses and midwives to replace the ‘baby boomer’ generation as they retire from the workforce in the next ten to fifteen years (National Review of Nursing Education, 2002). Injury prevention The Nurses & Midwives
