The relative geographic immobility of new registered nurses calls for new strategies to augment that workforce

Health Affairs

Volumn 30, Issue 12, 2011, Pages 2293-2300

  Kovner, Christine T ^a   Corcoran, Sean P ^b   Brewer, Carol S ^c  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ARTICLE; CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY; EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN; FEMALE; FUNDING; GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION; HIGH SCHOOL; HUMAN; LICENCE; NORMAL HUMAN; NURSING CAREER; NURSING EDUCATION; PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE; PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE; REGISTERED NURSE;

ADULT; CENSUSES; CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDIES; DEMOGRAPHY; FEMALE; GEOGRAPHY; HUMANS; MALE; NURSES; PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE LOCATION; QUESTIONNAIRES; UNITED STATES;

EID: 84855669994     PISSN: 02782715     EISSN: 15445208     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1377/hlthaff.2011.0108     Document Type: Article

References (33)

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17. The response rate must be estimated because some nonrespondents would have been ineligible for the study-they had not received their first nursing license in the previous eighteen months. We estimated the eligibility rate among nonrespondents based on the eligibility rate among respondents, which was 97 percent.
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21. Those not reporting an occupation either are not in the labor force or have not worked in the past five years. Current employment was not a requirement for inclusion in our sample.
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23. A closer look at the registered nurses who did not report a high school location did not suggest any systematic differences between that group and the full sample. For example, 56.9 percent of those without a high school location earned an associate's degree as their first degree in nursing, and 34.7 percent earned a bachelor's degree. The largest share of registered nurses without a high school location were working in New York (19.5 percent), Texas (13.8 percent), New Jersey (13.8 percent), and North Carolina (10.8 percent). They were slightly older, on average, than the full sample (34.9 years), a bit more likely to be married (62.0 percent), and more likely to have children (55.7 percent, with 24.2 percent having children at home who were younger than six years old). Their distribution across metropolitan, micropolitan, and small town or rural areas was very close to that of the full sample. None of the differences was statistically significant.
24. Indeed, our analysis of census data found that New York ranked as the lowest state for geographic mobility. Close to 77 percent of native-born professional workers in New York had been born in the state. Texas ranked twenty-first out of fifty on this list (59 percent of native-born professionals there had been born in the state); New Jersey, twenty-ninth (53 percent); and North Carolina, thirtieth (52 percent).
25. Notably, registered nurses constitute a substantial share of people with a professional occupation and an associate's degree. Registered nurses were 21 percent of this group in the full population of adult workers and 26 percent in the subsample of earlycareer women. Registered nurses were less dominant among the population of bachelor's degree holders, although there, too, they were one of the largest occupational categories.
26. Teacher categories include elementary and middle schools (13.0 percent of professionals with a bachelor's degree), secondary schools (2.9 percent), special education (0.6 percent), preschool and kindergarten (1.0 percent), and teacher assistants (0.8 percent).
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