Illinois Business Journal - Hospital teams up with colleges to battle nursing shortage epidemic

school students in becoming a nurse, resulting in more applications to nursing schools. But that has backfired a bit, she adds, as domestic schools of nursing were forced to turn away 140,000 qualified applicants last year - during the 2005-2006 academic year - for lack of capacity. That, says McKeon, traces back mainly to the lack of faculty.
   And the situation is expected to get worse. According to McKeon, the average nursing instructor right now is in his or her mid 50s and historically, most nursing instructors leave teaching around age 60.
   "Just the fact that there was a lack of people going into the profession in the 1990s has led to the lack of people who are trained at the master's or Ph.D. levels to teach new recruits today," said McKeon.
   Coupled with that is the fact that nurses with master's degrees or Ph.D. credentials can make more money nursing than teaching or by going into a different profession entirely, she said.
   The other problem with producing enough nursing instructors is the low student to teacher ratio necessitated by the nursing curriculum, according to McKeon.
   "Unlike a liberal arts program," she said, "you can't put 60 nursing students in a room with one teacher and lecture them. You have to actually have one-on-one contact to teach someone how to start an arterial line, for example."
   In addition, once nursing students go out into practice, generally speaking, they aren't going to come back and endow that program, McKeon says, because they're not working at the highest income levels.
   "We're also seeing an impact of what happened in the 1990s," she said. "That was a very tumultuous time in health care in general. Lots of nurses were actually laid off through the 90s. This is when health care facilities were downsizing due to many things, including cutbacks in Medicare payments, the penetration of managed care and others. At this time when hospitals were seeing problems with their bottom lines, one of the places they chose to cut was the number of registered nurses, replacing them with lower-paid aides. Now, we see that with the impending healthcare needs of the baby boom generation, there is a realization within health care that registered nurses really are critical to delivering high-quality care. There's this demand for more nurses, but the capacity to teach them and produce them is lacking," McKeon added.
   Exacerbating this problem, she says, is a burnout factor. According to McKeon, there are a half million trained nurses currently working outside the profession.
   In an effort to solve this problem, U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, submitted a proposal last spring to reduce restrictions on visas for foreign nurses so that more could be brought in from outside the country. This was opposed by the ANA.
   "Really, what Brownback is looking at is outsourcing nursing education," said McKeon. "What he's asking is that foreign nations educate nurses and then we (the U.S.) bring them over here to treat our patients. We do not think that the way to address the domestic nursing shortage is to go and recruit nurses from oversees, when we know very well that there is a worldwide shortage of nurses right now. We don't think that it's ethical to remove a nurse from Africa, for example - who is very likely the only person there providing AIDS treatment, or prenatal care or delivering babies - and bringing her here to work in an American hospital. We would prefer that we look at what is causing this domestic shortage and address it here."

...continued Hospital teams up with colleges to battle nursing shortage epidemic
school students in becoming a nurse, resulting in more applications to nursing schools. But that has backfired a bit, she adds, as domestic schools of nursing were forced to turn away 140,000 qualified applicants last year - during the 2005-2006 academic year - for lack of capacity. That, says McKeon, traces back mainly to the lack of faculty. And the situation is expected to get worse. According to McKeon, the average nursing instructor right now is in his or her mid 50s and historically, most nursing instructors leave teaching around age 60. "Just the fact that there was a lack of people going into the profession in the 1990s has led to the lack of people who are trained at the master's or Ph.D. levels to teach new recruits today," said McKeon. Coupled with that is the fact that nurses with master's degrees or Ph.D. credentials can make more money nursing than teaching or by going into a different profession entirely, she said. The other problem with producing enough nursing instructors is the low student to teacher ratio necessitated by the nursing curriculum, according to McKeon. "Unlike a liberal arts program," she said, "you can't put 60 nursing students in a room with one teacher and lecture them. You have to actually have one-on-one contact to teach someone how to start an arterial line, for example." In addition, once nursing students go out into practice, generally speaking, they aren't going to come back and endow that program, McKeon says, because they're not working at the highest income levels. "We're also seeing an impact of what happened in the 1990s," she said. "That was a very tumultuous time in health care in general. Lots of nurses were actually laid off through the 90s. This is when health care facilities were downsizing due to many things, including cutbacks in Medicare payments, the penetration of managed care and others. At this time when hospitals were seeing problems with their bottom lines, one of the places they chose to cut was the number of registered nurses, replacing them with lower-paid aides. Now, we see that with the impending healthcare needs of the baby boom generation, there is a realization within health care that registered nurses really are critical to delivering high-quality care. There's this demand for more nurses, but the capacity to teach them and produce them is lacking," McKeon added. Exacerbating this problem, she says, is a burnout factor. According to McKeon, there are a half million trained nurses currently working outside the profession. In an effort to solve this problem, U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, submitted a proposal last spring to reduce restrictions on visas for foreign nurses so that more could be brought in from outside the country. This was opposed by the ANA. "Really, what Brownback is looking at is outsourcing nursing education," said McKeon. "What he's asking is that foreign nations educate nurses and then we (the U.S.) bring them over here to treat our patients. We do not think that the way to address the domestic nursing shortage is to go and recruit nurses from oversees, when we know very well that there is a worldwide shortage of nurses right now. We don't think that it's ethical to remove a nurse from Africa, for example - who is very likely the only person there providing AIDS treatment, or prenatal care or delivering babies - and bringing her here to work in an American hospital. We would prefer that we look at what is causing this domestic shortage and address it here."	While there is a shortage of nurses in Southwestern Illinois, it's not nearly as grave as in many parts of the country, according to Cathie Ketterer, manager of nurse recruitment and retention at Alton Memorial Hospital in Alton. Alton Memorial's nurse vacancy rate is 6.6 percent, less than the state average of 7 percent and far less than the 16 percent national average. Ketterer has been an adjunct instructor at Lewis & Clark Community College's School of Nursing since 1989. She says Alton Memorial has close working relationships with Lewis & Clark, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and McKendree College. McKendree actually offers a master's program on site at Alton Memorial. "We have 15 nurses enrolled in the McKendree program and then we have a couple enrolled in other master's programs," said Ketterer. "We will probably lose a couple of them to faculty, which is really not a bad thing. Then that can help the school enroll more nurses and give us a larger pool to fill at our bedside." According to Rob Shelton, manager of public relations and development for Alton Memorial, the hospital and its foundation, the Alton Memorial Health Services Foundation, are now working with Lewis & Clark Community College to help expand its physical space. The foundation made a commitment of more than $2 million to help Lewis & Clark expand its nursing facilities. The building is currently under construction and is expected to open in the fall of 2007. "The other thing that our foundation is doing," said Shelton, "is when it gave that $2.4 million toward the expansion of the physical building, some of that money has also been allocated as an endowment for paying faculty salaries, recognizing that, yeah, you can build the building, but if you don't have the instructors in there you can't increase your capacity for nursing students." Shelton says most of the nursing students who graduate from the programs at Lewis & Clark and SIUE tend to stay within about a 25-mile radius of the area. "We're very fortunate in that we have two schools in our area, Lewis & Clark and SIUE," said Ketterer. "Both of the colleges do their clinical rotations through the hospital here, which helps us a lot because the students get to know the facility. They get comfortable with our nursing staff, so that when they graduate we do get quite a few graduates." Shelton encourages young people to consider the profession and says that his wife is currently a nursing student. "For those who are out there and are just considering what they want to do with their lives," Shelton said, "nursing will offer them job security forever with a lot of different opportunities. I don't want people to think that if you become a nurse, the only position you can ever have is on the actual hospital floor, caring for the patient. It's always a good place to start, but nurses can go into a lot of different aspects of the field. And I don't care where you go across this country or anywhere in the world - you can find a job."