In the early days of the pandemic, we heard repeatedly about hospitals hitting capacities. Medical staffs were slammed, with no relief in sight. Today, we’re seeing medical facilities hit their capacity limits again, only the cause isn’t overwhelming Covid cases. There simply aren’t enough nurses.
“Up until Covid, I think the attitude for many was that there was an inexhaustible supply of people who wanted to work in the health care field,” said Terry Buxton, chair of the Department of Nursing at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “Kind of like how the lumberjacks thought they’d never run out of trees in Seattle. Only we did.”
In Colorado, the recently passed HB22-1401 requires hospitals to create, implement and evaluate nurse-staffing plans. While this is a step in the right direction, said Christopher Looby, affiliate professor in the Department of Health Professions at MSU Denver, it doesn’t address the underlying problem: a lack of nursing teachers.
Buxton made it clear that plenty of qualified people are applying to the Nursing program, but due to a lack of educators, the program can accept only a fraction of them, about 75 students per year.
Part of the problem is that clinical faculty members must have a minimum of a master’s degree. What’s more, preceptors (licensed clinicians who oversee Nursing students during their clinicals) must have a bachelor’s degree. “So if somebody has an associate’s degree from a community college, they can’t really precept our Nursing students. So that makes it hard,” Buxton said.
Also, salaries for Nursing faculty members aren’t nearly as high as salaries for practicing nurses, who can pick up additional shifts or work overtime. Nurse educators might not even make enough to cover their school loans. Working in education is often a labor of love.
MSU Denver Nursing students Victoria Whitley, left, Alexia Girin, and Erin Apple practice foundational skills, including priming tubing for IVs, with instructor Jenny Bielefeld. Photo by Amanda Schwengel
“We’ve been wrestling with being able to get Nursing faculty for a while because of the requirements for our profession,” said Buxton, who’s also the co-chair for the Colorado Council on Nursing Education, a statewide organization of deans and directors of nursing programs.
“To have well-educated Nursing students, you have to have a cadre of well-educated faculty members who can teach those students,” she added.
Nursing and the supply chain
Looby teaches in the School of Business at MSU Denver as well as the Department of Health Professions. He specializes in predictive analytics, i.e., helping hospitals forecast patient volume and suggesting the right level of labor supply to meet expected demand.
During Covid, he said, the labor supply ran out, just as you might run out of water, coal or other resources. “We ran out of bandages; we ran out of masks; we ran out of people,” he said.
Original source can be found here.
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