Diversifying the Nursing Workforce

With nearly 30 million licensed professionals, the nursing workforce is the single largest sector of the global healthcare workforce and therefore has a central role in ensuring the protection of health as a fundamental human right. A persistent challenge to achieving this goal is the lack of diversity within the nursing workforce itself; globally 90% of nurses identify as female, 80% of U.S. nurses identify racially as white, and the largest age category of nurses is 65 and older (Smiley et al., J Nurs Regul 12(1):S1–S48, 2021). Furthermore, the American Nurses Association (American Nurses Association, National commission to address racism in nursing, 2021) has identified that the inequities evident within the profession are the result of structural racism that affects not only its composition but also the well-being of all nurses. Diversifying the nursing workforce is not only important to advancing health equity but also fundamental to fulfilling the profession’s moral and ethical obligations of integrity and social justice orientation to both its colleagues and the populations nursing serves. This chapter highlights recommendations from the Future of Nursing 2020–2030 report that focus on diversifying the nursing workforce. The chapter also highlights how the University of Nevada Las Vegas School of Nursing uses student-centered policies to increase, retain, and graduate male-identified students and how the Diversity CRNA program is being used to diversify the CRNA specialty nursing workforce.