ANA President Jennifer Mensik Kennedy Addresses Nursing Shortage and Vaccine Misinformation

American Nurses Association Tackles Worsening Labor Crisis Amid New Challenges

The U.S. nursing shortage is intensifying as industry pressures converge to create a perfect storm of workforce challenges, according to American Nurses Association (ANA) President Jennifer Mensik Kennedy.

Studies project the nation will need 1.2 million new registered nurses by 2030 to meet healthcare demands. Despite years of advocacy from the ANA, American Hospital Association, and health systems, significant barriers to nursing education, recruitment, and retention persist.

“It seems like we always have a shortage. I had a shortage when I just started as a nurse over 20 years ago,” Kennedy told Healthcare Dive at the HLTH 2025 conference in Las Vegas. “However, the reasons change.”

Kennedy pointed to systemic issues hampering progress, including the failure to establish a National Workforce Committee that was mandated when the Affordable Care Act passed. “That was to see, nationwide, how many nurses do we need? How many physicians do we need? Where do we need them? So we don’t have a national plan. States are trying to manage this.”

Recent federal budget decisions have exacerbated the problem. “In the Big Beautiful Bill, they took out all of the nursing education funding — all of it. And so schools are already panicked looking at what they can do, because you can’t just bring on more students with less funding,” Kennedy explained.

Nursing faculty shortages remain a persistent challenge. Kennedy supports legislation like the nurse faculty parity payment bill introduced in Congress last year, which would have equalized pay between nurse educators and clinical practitioners. Although that bill stalled, she remains hopeful about new proposals addressing education financing.

The funding disparity between nursing and medical education is stark. “Nursing education funding is through [the Health Resources and Services Administration], and it’s volatile. It’s up to administrations and the budget,” Kennedy noted. “When we look at physician education [funding] it’s constant. It’s funded through CMS. Nursing, even though we’re a much larger workforce, we only get one-fiftieth of what physicians get for education in this country.”

As healthcare systems turn to technological solutions like artificial intelligence, Kennedy cautioned against viewing AI as a replacement for nurses. “The American Nurses Association has different position papers on virtual nursing and AI, but what we say clearly is that it is supplemental; it does not replace a nurse.”

She explained that approximately 56% of nursing care is currently “missed” due to high patient loads, preventing nurses from completing critical tasks like surveillance, pain reassessments, and discharge education. While AI could help address some of these gaps, Kennedy warned against using technology as justification to increase patient loads.

“Just because it helps us doesn’t mean nurses are going to have more time for more patients. They’re just going to be able to take care of the patients more completely,” she said. Kennedy expressed concern about healthcare administrators making technology decisions without input from frontline nurses, emphasizing that “we need to have the nurses who are doing the care at the table with decision-makers.”

Beyond staffing challenges, today’s nurses face unprecedented cultural and political pressures. Varying standards of care across states, shifting vaccine guidelines, and patients armed with misinformation create additional burdens.

“When you have a different standard of care in New York and a different standard of care in Texas, it’s very, very hard,” Kennedy said. She noted that the ANA has had to update its vaccine policies to rely more on peer-reviewed literature rather than CDC guidelines due to concerns about recent government statements.

The misinformation epidemic has added another layer of stress. “Nurses want to take care of people and make them well, and if patients are not going to take the evidence-based advice, that’s really stressful,” Kennedy explained. Nurses increasingly find themselves having to counter dubious health claims spreading on social media, such as unfounded fears about Tylenol causing autism.

This daily strain is pushing many nurses toward burnout and exit. “Resilience is not something you should need to show up with every single day. But now, every day is getting to be that stressful day, and nobody can weather that every single day,” Kennedy observed.

The consequences are alarming: approximately 36% of new graduate nurses say they plan to leave their organizations within a year because of overwhelming stress. This turnover threatens to further destabilize an already precarious healthcare workforce.

As the industry navigates these challenges, Kennedy’s remarks highlight the urgent need for comprehensive solutions that address both longstanding structural issues and emerging cultural pressures affecting the nursing profession.