Nursing School Network

With the nursing shortage in full gear everybody wants to be a nurse. It may surprise you that there are tens of thousands of qualified nursing students being turned away from nursing schools throughout the county. There just isn’t enough faculty to teach the incoming students adding the ever growing shortage of qualified nursing predicted to be over 250,000 by the year 2025.

Since 1990 the Southern Regional Education Board (SERB) has warned that the current nursing shortage and shortage of nurse educator is at critical levels.  A clear example of this is in South Carolina where despite having 24 undergraduate nursing schools, there is a nursing shortage in the hundreds with a 50% dependency on out of state nurses.  One of the main problems facing nursing schools is the lack of funding needed to be able to train the required amount of nurses.

With the newly passed healthcare reform bill and an estimated 30 million soon to access to affordable healthcare, nursing schools will have an even larger strain as the demands for nurses with create an even larger shortage of nursing students. In order to accommodate the million seeking healthcare more nurse educators have to be found and more quality nursing students have to be educated to keep up with healthcare demands.

Source: http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2010/apr/03/03brinson/

The recession may have affected the nursing shortage — more nurses currently working have decided to continue working rather than retire, or have increased their hours from part time to full time, causing fewer openings for nurses — but it will return quickly once the nation’s economy recovers.

And one of the challenges facing nursing schools and programs as they work to train new nurses in a critical shortage of nursing school faculty and facilities to train nursing students.

The Associated Press in October reported on a gathering of nursing education leaders in Portland, Oregon who met to see if they could “find ways to boost the number of faculty in nursing programs.”

One idea they discussed involved what the article called the “Oregon model,” which “blends the curriculum and faculty of community colleges and universities to give nursing students in two-year associate degree programs a chance to earn bachelor’s degrees.”

This will help with the nursing faculty shortage because the “more nurses with bachelor’s, the greater the number expected to go onto advanced degrees and teaching,” according to the article.

This would be especially helpful in bringing younger nurses into faculty positions since most nursing faculty are nearing age 60 — and retirement.

The nursing shortage could mean 50 percent fewer nurses than are needed in Oregon by 2020 (this is compared to a 29 percent shortage nationwide), the article continued.

Yet another problem facing the need to beef up the number of nursing faculty is the issue of faculty salaries — nurses with advanced degrees and years of experience can make considerably more money as a working nurse (working in what nursing experts call the “practice arena”) rather than as a faculty member in a nursing school or program.