The Future of Nursing explores how nurses' roles, responsibilities, and education should change significantly to meet the increased demand for care that will be created by health care reform and to advance improvements in America's increasingly complex health system. At more than 3 million in number, nurses make up the single largest segment of the health care work force. They also spend the greatest amount of time in delivering patient care as a profession. Nurses therefore have valuable insights and unique abilities to contribute as partners with other health care professionals in improving the quality and safety of care as envisioned in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enacted this year. Nurses should be fully engaged with other health professionals and assume leadership roles in redesigning care in the United States. To ensure its members are well-prepared, the profession should institute residency training for nurses, increase the percentage of nurses who attain a bachelor's degree to 80 percent by 2020, and double the number who pursue doctorates. Furthermore, regulatory and institutional obstacles-including limits on nurses' scope of practice-should be removed so that the health system can reap the full benefit of nurses' training, skills, and knowledge in patient care. In this book, the Institute of Medicine makes recommendations for an action-oriented blueprint for the future of nursing.

Data on the numbers, distribution, and characteristics of nursing personnel and potential nursing resources are essential in planning health programs which will keep pace with changing health care requirements, in evaluating the outcome of the programs, and as baseline data for research studies and other investigations. Within the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the Division of Nursing is responsible for the compilation and continual analysis of these data. They are used extensively by the Division, by other units of the Department, by various Government agencies, planning groups, and by public and private organizations concerned with health manpower. This publication has been prepared in answer to numerous requests for updated source book materials, and to an increasing awareness of the need for their compilation. It presents the most recent data available for the States and the Nation in late 1974, continues the time series that are not included in other publications, and discusses similarities, differences, and limitations of various nurse manpower surveys, interrelated with new definitions and new trends. We hope that this systematic compilation and analysis of available data will provide for its users not only a useful reference volume, but also some bases for in-depth studies of specific variables which comprise the body of statistical knowledge of nursing personnel.