My wife recently gave me a tour of the nursing facilities at the community college where she teaches. Its 16-bed training lab looks like a real hospital. The setup includes state-of-the-art Hill Rom beds each with a mannequin patient, and mock-gas hookups on the wall. AV equipment in the classrooms is also top notch. It lets her stream video, overhead charts, and PowerPoint slides to classrooms 60 miles away. To ask questions, students at these remote facilities hit a button on their desk. Cameras beam back images of the questioner and classroom. It's an impressive setup.

“Getting this was the easy part,” she said. “The hard part is finding nurses qualified to teach. We have run out of them. To make matters worse, college nursing instructors are starting to retire. And those who remain burnout as workloads climb, just as with nurses in hospitals. Soon it won't matter if there are plenty of students. Schools won't be able to accept them because there will be too few instructors.”

Graduating nurses are in such demand they are treated like football stars — with signing bonuses. Some hospitals even recruit outside the country. The Philippines is a favorite place.

Anecdotal evidence says nursing rosters began declining about a decade ago when boneheaded administrators concluded nurses were overpaid and doing jobs lightly trained assistants could easily handle. After all, nurses just emptied bedpans, changed sheets, and passed out meds. They were a drain on shrinking operating funds, so getting rid of them would shrink payrolls. Hospitals that followed this line of reasoning ran into big trouble. Online reports say death and infection rates jumped.

A more recent study in Health Affairs concludes that raising the number of RNs and hours of nursing care per patient would save 6,700 lives and four-million days of patient care in hospitals annually. But ending the nursing shortage, now in its ninth year, is easier said than done. For instance, not all students in nursing schools turn into nurses. Their curriculum is just as demanding as engineering and many wash out.

Here's where you come in: Just invent equipment that improves nursing efficiency. One company working on the nursing shortage has developed a robo-nurse for ORs. Robotic Surgical Tech Inc., Bronx, N.Y., has built what it says is the world's first vision-guided, autonomous surgical robot, called Penelope. When a surgeon asks for an instrument, the system retrieves it from a tray with a special gripper and hands it over. After the surgeon finishes with it, Penelope's vision system locates the instrument and returns it to the tray.

Penelope seems promising. But new equipment should make nurses more efficient, not replace them. Two areas ripe for improvement are information technology and patient-moving equipment. Nurses constantly chart patient data and read entries and orders. People who are rushed occasionally enter incorrect information or misread it. And doctors' hand writing is still a source of jokes. There is a need for better ways of moving patients because Americans are getting heavier. Many nurses injure their backs lifting and repositioning patients.

For nurses reading this, tell us your wish lists and ideas for efficiency, and we'll print them. The smartest engineers in the world are reading.