As Congress struggles to finish its work on fiscal 2008 spending bills, hospital and nursing groups are beseeching lawmakers to stick with their plans to increase funds for the education of nurses.

The American Hospital Association and professional nursing societies warn that a massive nursing shortage is looming. While the United States likely will need more than 2.8 million registered nurses in 2020, it could have as few as 1.8 million working, according to a Health Resources and Services Administration report.

The aging of the baby boomers will send more nurses into retirement while increasing the need for these health-care workers at hospitals across the country.

That will worsen an existing shortage of nurses. The American Hospital Association reported an estimated 116,000 vacant positions for registered nurses as of December 2006.

The fiscal 2008 Labor-HHS-Education measure that President Bush vetoed last month would have provided $168 million to the Nursing Workforce Development program for undergraduate and graduate education of nurses, a 12 percent increase from the $150 million allocated in recent years. Bush’s budget sought to cut the funding to $105.3 million, said the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

U.S. nursing schools rejected more than 40,000 applications from qualified potential students last year because of a lack of teachers, classroom and training spaces, and budget constraints, said the AACN and the National League for Nursing.

The groups are lobbying Congress to stick to its guns in the final spending bill and provide the funding increase to train more nurses.