By Jennifer Larson, contributor

When the Wall Street Journal recently published an article discussing a link between the current sagging economy and a weakening of the nursing shortage, experts nodded but they added a caveat:

It's a just a blip. Don't get comfortable.

"It's a lessening. Not an alleviation," said Fay Raines, Ph.D., RN, president of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

There often is a correlation between a downturn in the U.S. economy and a slight uptick in the nursing workforce, but it is a temporary one, experts say. The problem is that while there may be a lessening, one of the fundamental causes of the nursing shortage is not affected at all.

"It's not really doing anything to add to the pipeline of educating a robust supply of nurses," said Matthew HcHugh, Ph.D., CRNP, RN, post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania.

Much of the current temporary easing of the shortage can be attributed to nurses returning to the workforce after a hiatus, perhaps to help out by supporting their families at a time when gas and food prices are skyrocketing. In other cases, nurses are taking on extra shifts or delaying retirement. But that does not improve the overall numbers of nurses or even potential nurses needed. Bottom line, experts say, the nation needs to not only create that robust supply of nurses, but it needs to find a way to educate even more.

A report recently released by nursing shortage expert Peter Buerhaus, Ph.D., RN and two colleagues noted that the demand for nurses may already be high but it will really balloon in just a few short years. According to Buerhaus, professor of nursing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, the impending retirement of the Baby Boomers and an aging population that will need even more heath care services will likely cause the shortage to spike around the year 2015. By 2020, an additional 285,000 nurses will be needed.

So what can be done?

According to Raines, the problem does not lie within a lack of interest in nursing. In fact, it's almost the contrary. AACN data shows that nursing school enrollments have experienced seven consecutive years of enrollment increases, but those same nursing schools have been forced to turn away potential students—people who genuinely want to become nurses. The schools do not have the faculty or the facilities necessary to educate enough nurses to meet the projected demand.

"That's where the bottleneck is," McHugh said. "If you can't increase the pipeline, that's where it's going to slow down."

Raines said the AACN estimates that approximately 40,000 qualified applicants were turned away by nursing school last year. The applicants were turned away not because they were not qualified but because the schools simply did not have enough faculty, classroom or lab space, or clinical sites to meet their needs. And that must be addressed.

More programs to develop faculty are needed, including funding for scholarships to help people who want to return to school to get a graduate degree with the goal of becoming an instructor or professor for a nursing school. McHugh said that nursing loan repayment programs are a good start, but the current ones are inadequate; he would like to see an expansion to meet future demand. Funds are also needed to pay competitive salaries to those nurses once they become faculty members, or there will be little incentive for them to complete the extra schooling.

In the meantime, Raines hopes the general public doesn't begin to believe that the nursing shortage is over just because of a temporary easing.

"We need to continue with a national focus on addressing the causes of the shortage," she said, noting that many institutions, from the government to universities, need to collaborate to make that happen. "It's a matter of making sure that the nursing shortage is a top priority for the country because everyone needs health care, and we all need to work together to make that happen."

"We need to be thinking with a long-term view," said McHugh.

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