Business and Nursing: The Bottom Line

Health care is the single largest driver of business costs and its high price tag has been a top concern of employers for years. A lack of nurses, caused by an insufficient number of faculty to prepare them, will increase the direct expense of health care coverage, and will negatively affect operations with increased health-related absenteeism. Without enough nurses to provide appropriate levels of care to employees, their children and family members, worker productivity will decrease, making it more difficult for business to remain profitable.

Conversely, a strong nurse workforce can play an important role in maintaining employee health and wellness, providing workers and their families with the services they need, including health promotion, disease prevention, and management of chronic illness.

If the nurse and nurse faculty shortages are not reversed, the Garden State’s already struggling economy will suffer even more. A robust and dynamic nursing workforce is key to business success, worker health, and the economic development the state needs.

Businesses in the Red

• The annual cost to businesses of poor health care quality per covered employee is $1,900.¹

Loss of Productivity

• The 4.6 million cases of the most common chronic diseases reported in New Jersey in 2003 – cancers, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, mental disorders and pulmonary conditions – cost state businesses an estimated $31.5 billion in lost productivity²
• Each year, in the United States, businesses face as many as 45 million avoidable sick days, the equivalent of 180,000 full time employees calling in sick every day for a full year, because of poor quality care³
• Low quality care costs employers more than $7.4 billion in lost productivity.
• The indirect cost of poor quality care is $50 billion related to absence and productivity loss nationally.⁴

1. Midwest Business Group on Health, Reducing the Costs of Poor-Quality Health Care, April 2003.
2. The Milken Institute, An Unhealthy America: The Economic Burden of Chronic Disease, October 2007. Available at http://www.chronicdiseaseimpact.com/ebcd.taf?cat=state&state=NJ.
3. National Committee for Quality Assurance, The State of Health Care Quality 2007, 2007. Available at http://www.ncqa.org/Portals/0/Publications/Resource%20Library/SOHC/SOHC_....
4. National Committee for Quality Assurance, The State of Health Care Quality 2007, 2007. Available at http://www.ncqa.org/Portals/0/Publications/Resource%20Library/SOHC/SOHC_....
5. Midwest Business Group on Health, Reducing the Costs of Poor-Quality Health Care, April 2003.