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WASHINGTON, Sep 28 (Reuters Health) - The federal government will free up $27.4 million in grants and contracts in an attempt to begin addressing the national nursing shortage, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson announced Friday.

Thompson said that his department would award $20.4 million in grants to 82 colleges and universities in an effort to boost basic and advanced nurse training. Some of the money will also go to help nurses-in-training from disadvantaged backgrounds get their degrees and enter the field.

Another $7.3 million will be used to repay student loans for nurses who agree to serve in nonprofit or public facilities where shortages are hitting healthcare delivery hard. Five million of those dollars were already released by the agency earlier this year.

Surveys predict that the nation could be short by as many as 500,000 nurses by the time many current nurses retire by 2020. The trend is made more dire by the large numbers of baby boomers preparing to retire, possibly doubling by the middle of the century the population of retirees needing healthcare.

"This is by no means a comprehensive solution," Thompson told nurses and nursing students at a ceremony at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The department would also be looking at its existing programs to see where more money can be squeezed to help nursing, Thompson said.

He pledged to work with a Congress that is currently considering several different and complex approaches to fixing the nursing crisis. Some plans include tax credits to encourage students to become nurses, while others offer loan forgiveness for nurses or salary boosts through increased Medicare hospital reimbursements.

Still other approaches seek to improve working conditions for hospital nurses, who have long complained that poor safety, long hours and mandatory overtime make the profession unattractive to many qualified trainees.

Patricia Underwood, vice president of the American Nursing Association, called on health systems and hospitals that employ nurses to "reexamine their way of doing business."

Hospitals have complained since 1997 that their payments through the Medicare program were too low to support adequate salaries and staff levels for nurses. Some members of Congress have pledged to pass legislation raising those reimbursement levels.

If such increases occur, the government "must hold those institutions accountable that such moneys are used to increase nurse staffing," Underwood said.

Key members of Congress said earlier this week that a comprehensive legislative fix to the nursing shortage will probably have to wait until January 2002, when Congress reconvenes.