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The University of Maine School of Nursing welcomed a new Nurse Educator Certificate Program to its curriculum this fall to address concerns over a predicted national nurse shortage.
The certification earned in this program allows students who don’t want to pursue a master’s degree the chance to prepare themselves to effectively teach incoming nurses in classroom and clinical settings.
“What we have done is taken three courses from the graduate program and pulled them out, creating a certificate program,” said Nancy Fishwick, director of the nursing school. “This way, a nurse could come in with a baccalaureate degree, and if they didn’t want to go for a master’s degree at that point, they can take these three courses and have a certificate from the University of Maine as a nurse educator.”
The University of Maine School of Nursing received an $80,000 grant from the Maine Department of Labor Health Care Sector, which jump-started the new program by encouraging students to join by lowering expenses for the first 10 nurses to enroll.
The grant will be dispersed amongst students to cover their tuition, mileage reimbursement and other associated costs.
“It is a one-time sum of money […] that came into each state from the affordable care act,” Fishwick said. “The money came through the labor department in different states, and it was designated to prepare people who are not currently employed or maintain unreliable employment with education and skills they need to be employed in some kind of field.”
The initiative is aimed at increasing the number of clinical nursing instructors for qualified nursing students and to decrease the amount of students on waiting lists in Penobscot, Piscataquis and Hancock counties.
The ten selected students were recruited from local hospitals. Fishwick said that the university did not know it was receiving the money until last minute this summer, and this required the school to scramble to recruit 10 students for the program.
By passing word along to local hospitals, the school was able to line up enough students in a short period of time.
The students had to sign paperwork acknowledging their commitment to finish the program and provide some type of nurse education in the future in return for the grant money.
“Applications have gone up recently” for undergraduate nursing degrees, Fishwick said. “But the ability to absorb more students has not increased.”
Fishwick added that the nursing school has graduated approximately 70 to 80 students a year since her arrival three years ago.
This increase in nursing school applicants being turned away due to a lack of room is a problem nationwide that has many members of the nursing community concerned about health care for future generations. The trend has created a problem for future generations, according to Fishwick.
“There is a lot of national attention on the fact that we have an aging population. Every day 10,000 people, mainly baby boomers, are turning 65. That is impressive,” Fishwick said. “There is this aging cohort that are going to be living longer and are going to need more nurses as opposed to less.”
Along with 10,000 new baby boomers each day, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in 2010 will provide 32 million more Americans with health care, drastically increasing the pool of individuals in need of health care.
According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 283,000 jobs were added to the health care sector in 2010. It is one of the few sectors that showed continued growth in an otherwise slow economy.
As the population of people in need of nurses and health care provided by nurses increases every day, the incoming nursing population is not growing to meet the need.
The AACN reported that U.S. nursing schools declined 67,563 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing schools in 2010.
Reasons for this included the lack of faculty members, clinical sites, classroom space and budget constraints. Two-thirds of involved schools that responded to a survey by the AACN listed faculty shortages as a reason for not accepting all qualified applicants into their programs.
“There is a big gap in the number of practicing nurses out there combined with an aging population,” Fishwick said. “[This is a] population that has more chronic health problems, so the demand for nurses is going to go up. To produce more nurses we need more faculty, and the same phenomenon facing nurses faces nurse faculty nationwide.”
The average nurse is 47 years old, according to the AACN. One-third of the nursing population is older than 50.
“There is concern that both nurses at the bedside and nurse faculty are all going to retire in the next five to 10 years,” Fishwick said. “There is going to be a big exodus, and there are not enough people coming along to fill our spots.”
Fishwick concluded that the Nurse Educator Certificate Program is one way to address the issue. The hope is that by making it easier for a nursing student to obtain the training needed to teach new nurses, they will be more likely to do it. If there are more instructors available, fewer prospective students will be forced to sit on a waiting list.
“It’s a projected need for more professional and qualified nurses in anticipation of the aging population and their needs,” Fishwick said. “It took a little while to put two and two together and realize that programs were going to be losing nursing faculty at the same pace.”
Bangor Daily News