The New York Times has an insightful article about the current state of nursing affairs in the United States. The short form? Doctors should be pretty scared about how things look right now. Today, twelve percent of nursing positions are unfilled, and that number is growing; hospitals are resorting to aggressive recruiting measures just to make sure that inpatient wards are minimally staffed. From personal experience, I can attest to another problem — nurses in the big academic centers face tons of work and even more stress, and many of them are fleeing for the relative calm of suburban community hospitals, impacting clinical research and medical education. Hopefully, state and federal incentives are going to have an effect soon.