The situation has the potential to become even bleaker in the future. Forty-five percent of hospital registered nurses in Maine are age 45 or older, and the number of nursing school graduates has notably declined in recent years. At the same time, America's baby-boom population is growing older and demanding more health care. According to the United States Census Bureau, the number of Mainers age 65 or older will jump by 26 percent between 2005 and 2015. With more than three-quarters of Maine's hospitals reporting that they are finding it more difficult to recruit registered nurses, it is clear that we need to take steps to address this problem before it becomes a serious threat to Maine's health care system.
To make headway, we will need a sustained commitment on the part of our federal, state, and health care leaders, and we will need funding. A report compiled by a task force of Maine legislators found that the number of registered nurses and licensed practical nurses graduating lags significantly behind the number required by our hospitals and nursing homes. To narrow the gap, the task force recommended spending nearly $4 million a year to expand health care programs at Maine's colleges and universities so that more aspiring health care professionals can be trained.
In the U.S. Senate, I have worked to tackle this problem. I am pleased to report that the Senate recently approved $20 million to fund the Nurse Reinvestment Act, a law I wrote to address the nursing shortage. The Nurse Reinvestment Act, which was signed into law last August, seeks to remedy the shortage of nurses in Maine and across the country by expanding recruitment, strengthening the current nurse workforce, and encouraging faculty to teach nursing. This bipartisan legislation should go a long way toward improving the situation, and the Senate's recent vote to fund the Act will help ensure that it can be effective.
The Nurse Reinvestment Act authorizes millions of dollars in grants to help expand the ranks of nurses. A major portion will be allotted for educational assistance grants to help individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds pursue a nursing career. Schools of nursing will be eligible for additional grants to work with their communities, especially local high schools, to expand programs in nurse mentoring. Another significant portion of the Act's grant awards will fund career ladder grants, which will allow schools of nursing to encourage their students to pursue more specialized nursing education. The last large set of grants is designed to encourage other would-be nurses to enter the nursing profession and focus on long-term care.
Besides these grants, the legislation will create a Fast-Track Nursing Faculty Loan program. The program will allow non-profit schools of nursing to award significant loans to masters or doctoral nursing students who otherwise would find continuing their education financially impossible.
Our legislation will also create the Nurse Corps Scholarship Program, which will be especially valuable to Maine. This program will provide scholarships for up to four years for part- or full-time nursing students, in exchange for their serving in an area that lacks an adequate number of nurses upon completion of their education. For Maine's many rural patients, this program could result in a significant improvement in their health care.
Finally, the Nurse Reinvestment Act will provide for a national multi-media public education campaign to improve the image of nursing and encourage individuals to enter the nursing profession. The Nurse Reinvestment Act provides a series of creative solutions to the growing shortage of health care professionals and the shrinking enrollments in our nursing programs. With increasingly complex medical treatments, we need qualified nurses today more than ever. Nursing is a demanding profession, and we need to make sure that we are recruiting well, both in terms of the talent and in the numbers of our future health care workers. I am committed to making sure that our hospitals have the human resources they need, and shoring up our nursing population is an important step to take.