This month's cover story looks at the lengths hospitals will go to secure quality staff and the distance nurses will travel to practice where their skills are needed.

Administrators and nurses alike thought the local traveler program was a cockeyed idea. Critics thought hiring out-of-town nurses for hard-to-fill vacancies and providing them with hotel accommodations while working in metro Atlanta would cause nurses to grow weary from travel and hospitals to get tired of footing the bills.

Not so at Northside Hospital, whose program has been operating since 1998 and has grown to about 185 traveling employees. Nor at Piedmont Hospital, whose 18-month-old commuter program is not only filling vacancies, but helping with retention rates.

Sometimes you just have to look at a situation with new eyes. It may surprise you to see how this arrangement works for nurses with different career goals and family situations.

World War II brought more kinds of job opportunities for women working on the home front, creating a national nursing shortage. But 124,065 nursing students answered the call by joining the Cadet Nurse Corps.

In exchange for scholarships and stipends to attend nursing schools, the young women pledged to provide essential nursing services (wherever they were needed) for the duration of the war. While most students did not graduate in time to serve overseas, they made valuable contributions at home.

In this 60th anniversary year of DDay, we thank Cadet Nurse Corps and Georgia Baptist College of Nursing alumnae Johnnie Wallace Forgay, Kathryn Ransbotham and Helen Thompson for their memories and their dedicated careers in nursing.

Help is on the way for Georgia's shortage of nurse anesthetists. Certified registered nurse anesthetists administer approximately 65 percent of the anesthetics given to patients in the United States, with fewer than 800 practicing in Georgia.

The Medical Center of Central Georgia and Mercer University's School of Medicine have teamed up to offer a new nurse anesthesia educational program. Although final accreditation is pending until January, the school is taking applications now for its first class to start in August. Hurry, the deadline is Dec. 1.