# National Nursing Workforce Center Act of 2022

This bill creates a new National Nursing Workforce Center that would collect and analyze data about the nursing profession in America. Think of it as a research hub designed to give policymakers, hospitals, and nursing schools better information about how many nurses we have, where they're working, what they earn, and what challenges they face. Right now, this kind of comprehensive nursing workforce data is scattered across different agencies and organizations, making it hard to see the big picture of the nursing shortage and plan for future needs.

The center would track important information like how many nurses are entering the profession, how many are leaving, retirement trends, geographic shortages, and demographic details about the nursing workforce. This data would help hospitals understand where they might have staffing problems, help nursing schools figure out how many students to train, and help the government make better decisions about healthcare policy. The center would also likely study issues like nurse burnout, working conditions, and diversity in the nursing field—all things that affect whether people stay in nursing careers.

For everyday people, this matters because nursing shortages directly impact healthcare quality and availability. When hospitals don't have enough nurses, wait times get longer, patient care can suffer, and nurses become more stressed and burned out. By creating better data and research about the nursing workforce, this bill aims to help solve these problems before they get worse. It's essentially an investment in understanding and fixing the nursing shortage so that hospitals can staff properly and provide better care to patients.

National Nursing Workforce Center Act of 2022

Merkley, Jeff

National Nursing Workforce Center Act of 2022 This bill sets out a pilot program to support state agencies, state boards of nursing, nursing schools, or other eligible entities with establishing or expanding state-based nursing workforce centers that carry out research, planning, and programs to address nursing shortages, nursing education, and other matters affecting the nursing workforce. The bill also expands the authority of the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to establish health workforce research centers and specifically requires that HRSA establish a center focused on nursing.