We definitely will see an increased shift away from the hospital setting to more skilled nursing settings. We forecast a 17 percent drop in the number of hospital beds between now and 2010. I also see a greater role for nurse practitioners working as health care providers, which is of major importance, because they work so much in outpatient settings. At the same time, there is a trend toward using physician extenders, most often in underserved and outpatient settings, leading to an increased demand for NPs and PAs in primary care. Rather than nurses becoming more like NPs, you ll have a higher demand for NPs.
Nurses often are there to provide more than clinical support.
They provide the emotional support that physicians do not, and we see that probably increasing. I see almost a split in the skills in demand, at the LVN level or the NP level. In medicine in general we see a pretty consistent rate of increase in pay. Because of the significant demand for cost containment and a shift to outpatient settings, you re seeing fewer people in the hospital, but their level of illness is increasing. Specially trained nurses working with those individuals require higher pay.