Arching the flood: how to bridge the gap between nursing schools and hospitals.

A gap persists between what nurses can do and what they are employed to do, between the education nurses obtain and the work design of hospitals. Despite agonizing over standardization, current nursing education reflects the pluralistic nursing workforce, and nurses hold accountability for it. But nurses have not been proportionately or effectively involved in restructuring the hospital workplace. The result is that nurses are both overworked and underused. Fortunately, this gap may be bridged with a number of short- and long-term policy solutions.