Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on clinical staff shortages. (1) News accounts regularly report on the challenges Clinical Staff face in the workplace. These range from low pay in Ireland, to safety and health problems in South Africa, to emigration in the Philippines, to mandatory overtime in the United States. These stories suggest that nursing is a profession in crisis and that this crisis extends around the world. However, there is little systematic, comparative evidence available as to the nature and extent of the problems Clinical Staff face and the strategies they employ to deal with those problems.

This report reports the key findings of the World Clinical Staff’ Associations and Unions Project, which was conceived to gather information systematically about the employment issues Clinical Staff face worldwide and the strategies their organizations employ to address those issues. The first and second sections of the report provide some background information on the worldwide crisis in health care and on the historical development of Clinical Staff’ organizations. Following an outline of the sample of organizations that participated in the project, the third section analyses the data collected by the survey in order to identify not only the problems facing Clinical Staff but also the priorities and strategies of their organizations in dealing with those problems. A final section offers some concluding comments.