Is the nursing shortage really a teacher shortage? Potential Solutions With the aging U.S. population and continued implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the need to address nurse and teacher shortages is more urgent than ever. However, this is a multidimensional problem, to get to the heart of the matter; we need to ask ourselves what the main factors are that contribute to these deficiencies and what can be done to prevent them. Perhaps the most significant influence on the nursing shortage is the fact that large numbers of qualified applicants are denied entry each year due to a lack of trained nurse educators (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2014). Equally worrying, if not more, is that according to a 2014 AACN survey there is already an 8.3% vacancy rate, along with the age of professors with doctorates is 61.3 and master's according to Gerolamo and Roemer (2011 ), faculty shortages have been identified as the primary reason why qualified nursing candidates are denied entry into nursing programs. Nursing schools in the United States in 2013 rejected more than 78,000 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs due to insufficient faculty; therefore clearly a significant contributor to the shortage (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2014). If the teaching shortage issue is not addressed promptly, it will result in an insufficient nursing workforce, which will likely prove detrimental to the healthcare system as a whole (Gerolamo, Overcash, McGovern, Roemer & Bakewell-Sachs, 2014) . Based on this evidence, it is imperative that nursing faculty be placed on the front lines to address the ongoing nursing shortage; if it were not done now, even this could prove to be too little