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Although change is occurring in the health system of North Carolina, there remains a strong demand for nursing personnel. The findings pose a challenge to produce a nursing workforce sufficient in numbers and education.

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Assuring a nurse workforce that is large enough and possesses the right competencies for the changing demographic and health reform scenarios of the early twenty-first century is nothing short of an imperative. Getting there will involve continual recruitment of a talented and diverse group of people and increasing nurses' progression to a more highly educated workforce, no matter where they enter the profession. These actions will enable the United States to fill vacant nursing faculty positions as we simultaneously re-create how nursing education is delivered in this country. The nation's health is dependent on the actions we now take.

Despite concerns expressed over the past 25 years, little progress has been made in improving the accuracy, availability, and timeliness of national data on the U.S. nursing workforce. In Part 1 of this two-part series, we review the current national data sources on nurse supply, demand, and education programs. We discuss the advantages that state-level data collection efforts enjoy in many states and propose that national data sets could be easily and cost-effectively built from state-level contributions-if states collected a standardized set of information. As part of a larger effort to standardize state-level data, from July to December 2008, we analyzed surveys and codebooks from 26 states collecting nurse workforce data. We present the results of this data assessment and conclude that data collection practices as of 2008 varied substantially from state to state. Creation and adoption of standardized minimum nursing workforce data sets is suggested to bring states into alignment.