Editorial The future of nursing workforce research

Twenty years and two global nurse shortages ago, nursing workforce research was just emerging as a field. However, workforce participation among nurses and interest in nursing careers had swung widely for many decades before (Friss, 1994). Concerns about working conditions for nurses and difficulties in relations between nurses and other members of the healthcare team had long been recognized but were perhaps accelerated by the second wave of feminism beginning in the 1960s (Sullivan, 2002). Workforce research was arguably a response to the practical problems created by staffing shortages in the mid to late 1980s, when many hospitals went through periods where beds were closed or surgeries were cancelled to cope with staffing shortages. In many communities, nursing school enrollments dropped several years earlier when decreased job availability and declines in the perceived attractiveness of nursing careers led to an inability to cover rebounds in demand and normal attrition. By the late 1990s, when workforce research had already established some roots, developments in healthcare systems worldwide, especially deep cuts and restructuring of healthcare systems, were about to trigger yet another shortage several years down the line. A simplified interpretation of demographic trends (an ‘aging of the population ’ story) told us that these earlier shortages were only the beginning of deep imbalances between supply an