By Jaymie BaxleyThough North Carolina still has far fewer nurses than it needs, incremental gains have been made in addressing the shortage. Forty-eight percent of respondents in a 2022 survey conducted by the North Carolina Nurses Association said they had “personally witnessed violence” at work in the past two years. “We’ve identified a nursing shortage in North Carolina for close to half a century,” he said. It has been estimated that North Carolina will need 17,500 more nurses over the next decade to keep up with the state’s aging and growing population. “In the near future, the people math gets really scary as we think about North Carolina’s population growth and projections for us to have a million additional seniors living in North Carolina,” MacCracken said.