The face of nursing has been changing over the last 50 years. Women who a half a century ago would only work as nurses until they married are now ending up as nursing managers and administrators, moving out of the practical field. . But still it has been noted that the age of the nursing workforce has increased over the last quarter of a century, and fewer younger people are entering the nursing profession. In fact, at the time of the survey by the Bureau of Health Professions in 1997, baby boomers (those born between 1947 and 1962) were the largest component of the nursing workforce and at the current time only nine percent of registered nurses are younger than 30 years of age (Santucci, 2004). If this trend continues, then it would mean that the need for nursing would increase by as much as 22% between the years of 1998 and 2008. .

             The demographics of nursing are changing as to the working environment as well. While hospitals employ about 60% of all nurses, the nurses who work in hospitals are likely to be younger, mostly due to the strain of physically demanding work and the shift work involved. While the hospitals tend to produce recruiting programs more focused on younger nurses, this also means that there is the need to promote relationships between the different generations of nurses. Problems in workplaces are the most often sited issues when it comes to job turnover rates among nurses. And the flow of younger nurses toward the hospital setting also means that the number of new graduate nurses being hired into the nursing pool is getting higher. This in turn results in a greater number of rather inexperienced new nurses in positions that may be better filled by experienced nurses. .

             In order to answer this problem, residency programs have been developed for new graduate nurses, to provide orientation to the specialty areas such as critical care, medical/surgical and psychiatry.