Most people rely on nurses to draw blood, give shots and take temperatures at the doctor's office.
But for how much longer?
In his fiscal year 2008 budget, released last month, President George W. Bush called for a $44 million decrease in funding for Nursing Workforce Development Programs, which provide financial support for nursing schools nationwide- including Penn's.
If approved by Congress, the decrease from $149.7 million to $105.3 million would eliminate the Advanced Education Nursing program, which provides grants and traineeships for almost 12,000 graduate nursing students across the country.
Officials at the Penn School of Nursing, home to around 400 undergraduates, have expressed "outrage" at the potential cut.
"This is absolutely the worst time" to cut funding for these programs, said Nursing Dean Afaf Meleis, especially since "we are facing globally a major shortage of faculty."
Meleis, a member of the American Association for Colleges of Nursing-, an organization that brings together nursing deans from around the country, will go with other Pennsylvania nursing deans to try to convince Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) not to pass the proposed budget.
These programs are being cut because they received a rating of "ineffective" in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's Program Assessment Rating Tool, David Bowman, a Health Resources and Services Administration spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.
HRSA is a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and works to help improve health care programs.
"The President's budget priority focuses on activities that fund the place ment of more doctors, nurses and other health care professionals . through scholarship and loan repayment programs," Bowman said.
But Meleis stressed that granting scholarships to potential undergraduates won't solve the national shortage of nurses.
Rather, she said, money needs to go toward graduate education in order to train the next generation of nursing educators.
"The shortage of nurse faculty [prevents] nursing schools from expanding their enrollment," Nursing professor Linda Aiken said.
The Council on Physician and Nurse Supply, composed of academic and health care leaders, estimates that nursing schools need to increase their class sizes by 25 percent in order to fill the deficit. This shortage is expected to expand to 800,000 by 2020.
And nursing students are just as concerned as their professors.
"The fact that they're cutting back just doesn't show a lot of respect or intelligence," said Nursing freshman Rachel Glincher, who added that many of her professors have addressed the issue of nursing shortages in her classes.
Glincher said she is very concerned about paying for her master's degree, especially since, at Penn, students are highly encouraged to go to graduate school.
