A frightening report from Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy. First, the report reviews data on patient mortality rates and points out strong evidence to suggest that the fewer nurses per patient in a hospital, the more likely the patient will die. And it's not a slight correlation. Increasing a nurses patient load from four to eight, according to an American Medical Association study, is accompanied by a 31% increase in mortality. How much more blunt does the message need to be? The current blockade of foreign nurses is literally killing people.

Those opposing nursing immigration argue we should instead be training more American nurses, but Anderson's report puts to bed this as a a realistic solution. According to the statement released with the report:

The study recommends policymakers focus on the two most practical solutions to alleviate the impact of the nursing shortage on U.S. patients. 1) Increasing nursing faculty and school infrastructure and 2) Raising immigration quotas to facilitate the entry of foreign nurses.

So far, U.S. nursing schools have shown they do not have enough capacity to accommodate significant increases in their graduation rates. “In 2005, schools of nursing were forced to reject 147,000 qualified applicants because of shortages of faculty, classroom space, and clinical placement sites for students.” Given that even optimistic projections assume a continued nurse shortage lasting a decade or more, policymakers concerned about the shortage’s impact on U.S. hospital patients must consider relaxing current immigration quotas.

“Immigration alone cannot solve the nursing shortage but it can alleviate many of its most damaging impacts on patients,” said NFAP Executive Director Stuart Anderson, the author of the study. Anderson served as Executive Associate Commissioner for Policy and Counselor to the Commissioner of the INS (August 2001 to January 2003) and as Staff Director of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee.

Congress will likely be taking up a nurse immigration measure in the coming weeks. If this report doesn't convince them of the need to act, then they just don't care about what's in the best interest of the citizenry.

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