![]() "Faculties and schools have found ways to innovate, to educate students by the use of the internet, distance learning, and simulation labs," says Peter Buerhaus, a professor and health economist at Montana State University's College of Nursing who studies the nursing workforce. In addition, since the beginning of the pandemic, nursing students have had a harder time getting the clinical or hands-on training required to graduate, because hospitals curtailed their training programs to control the risk of infection. scrambled so much, they actually have to extend semesters," Goldfarb says. "Some schools went on hiatus some schools reduced their enrollment, so they took even fewer students some schools. Taken together, those factors are severely limiting the number of students that schools can accept, and in some cases it disrupts classes themselves. With so many in their late 50s and 60s, the country's nursing faculty is continuing to decline, to about two-thirds what it was in 2015. That desperation is compounded by an aging demographic. "There is not a school I know of that isn't desperately looking for nursing faculty." "To lose an additional 30% has been devastating," she says. Educators in the field are required to have advanced degrees yet typically earn about half that of a nurse working the floor of a hospital. One of the biggest bottlenecks in the system is long-standing: There are not enough people who teach nursing. A lack of instructors is part of the problem Yet - paradoxically - becoming a nurse has become more difficult, narrowing the pipeline for new nurses coming through the system. Leaders in nursing say the trends - which predate the pandemic - are the same for certificate programs in licensed practical nursing, licensed vocational nursing and certified nursing assistants programs. And the interest is there enrollments and applications in baccalaureate and advanced nursing degree programs increased last year. They're offering jobs to students even before they graduate, and in many cases offering bonuses and loan repayment as financial incentives. He says pursuing nursing "was my ticket to doing everything that I wanted."Īcross the country, hospitals desperate for nurses - especially in acute care -are trying to address intense burnout among health care workers and accelerated nurse retirements by hiring new graduates. There were some 800 others applying for 64 slots.įoxx Whitford is completing his undergraduate degree and training to be a registered nurse in Northern California, and he hopes eventually to work in an emergency department. Still, when he tried to transfer to a four-year bachelor of science in nursing program, he lost out. After nearly failing an anatomy course, he eventually made the dean's list and won student-athlete awards. Whitford, a C-average student in high school, says he spent sleepless nights in community college, studying and teaching himself to learn. "Every time things get hard, I always think about all those losses and hard times," says Whitford, a nursing student at California State University, East Bay.Īnd everything about his nurse training has been hard. All of that hardship, he says, prepared him for one of his biggest life challenges: getting into and through nursing school during a pandemic. As a teenager, he joined the Marines to help put himself through college and he completed a harrowing tour in Afghanistan. He grew up desperately poor in Fairfield, Calif., losing a beloved brother to epilepsy and getting evicted from his home as a child. Struggle is nothing new to Foxx Whitford. Houston Cofield/Bloomberg via Getty Images The pandemic has only added to a longstanding nursing shortage in the U.S., statistics show. Nurses check on a patient in a Jonesboro, Ark., ICU in August when the delta variant sparked yet another surge of serious COVID-19 cases in the region.
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