DENVER (ASRN.ORG) - Colorado's Governor Bill Ritter, may have won the battle stopping legislated mandated nursing staffing levels against the nursing union, but it hasn't gone away for good.  At the time of the union negotiations, he created a task force to address the nursing shortage, which he now has to address.

"There are 3,600 hospital RN vacancies in Colorado. But if you consider that 21,000 of the more than 53,000 licensed registered nurses in the state aren't working as RNs, we may be able to create incentives to reduce, if not eliminate the nursing shortage."  That figure includes nurses that have retired, according to the Nurse Alliance of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that compiled the statistics.

The Governor is also studying ways that the state can offer health coverage to Colorado's 770,000 uninsured while keeping rising premiums down.

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