Thank you for the question, Chair.
One of the realities across the country.... If we just look at nursing, there are roughly 450,000 nurses. We have a terrible shortage of nursing care. I'm never sure if we have a shortage of nurses. In many places, half of those people are part-time. What are the kinds of things you can do, even if you took a chunk of them and moved them to full-time hours?
Many people who are internationally educated graduates in the country are not getting into the system as quickly as they could.
What do you do to move people in and retain them?
People who are in the system are telling us that the reason they're going is not the money or retention bonuses. It's staffing. If the federal government could make some effort.... We had suggested a $300-million package to support better staffing.
The government could use some incentives, such as tax forgiveness, for example. If I'm 25 and you said to me that if I stayed for five years, you would wipe my student debt clean, that would get my attention, or if I'm 65 and you say to stay for two more years and you'll forgive the first 25% of my income. There are some creative levers that the federal government could do that would be attention getting for people.
The nurses are telling us, for example, late in career that they're making pretty good money. Five thousand dollars doesn't attract someone who is in the $80,000 to $100,000 category to stay in terrible working conditions.
What do you do to keep as many people in the system as possible?
We think the strong funding support of the federal government plus convening some planning—the federal government is good at doing that—would go a long way to shoring up the resources in the nursing sector.