Nurse educator shortages reach "crisis" levels
With salaries for registered nurses in the Central Mass. area ranging as high as $80,000+ in clinical settings, convincing young nursing professionals to make the switch to teaching is more than a daunting task.
A shortage of nurse educators has already reached crisis proportions in Massachusetts, and with baby boomer-age faculty set to retire, the full impact of those shortages has yet to hit, experts say.Educators say their hands are tied without access to a qualified educator pool, because they can’t expand their existing nursing programs to help counter a projected shortage of clinical nurses.
About 4,820 full-time registered nursing jobs became vacant in 2005. Following current trends, the state is projected to face a total of 9,096 nursing vacancies in 2010, and as many as 25,382 in 2020, according to a recent survey by the Boston-based Massachusetts Hospital Association and the Massachusetts Organization of Nurse Executives.
Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester enrolls approximately 100 students in its Registered Nurse program annually. But like nursing programs across the state, the college has a rolling waiting list out to 2008.
Even if the college approves and can fund new faculty positions for those programs, there isn’t a pool of qualified faculty to fill them, says Patricia Creelman, clinical director of Nurse Education at Quinsigamond Community College. "We talk about a nursing shortage, but the bigger issue is the faculty shortage."
Programs accredited by the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission (NLNAC) require their faculty members to have a minimum of a Master’s degree in nursing, and clinical experience. Those candidates have many other professional opportunities available to them.
The Graduate Entry Pathway program launched at UMass Medical School’s Graduate School of Nursing in August 2004 is designed to fast track students with bachelor’s degrees in fields other than nursing. In addition to preparing students for clinical settings, the Pathway program also has an Educator Track to help feed the pool of nursing faculty.
"Those of us that have been in nursing education for a number of years know that you develop a love for that aspect of the field," says Creelman. "If you can foster those feelings in a young nurse, then the salary doesn’t make as much of a difference."
New grant and forgivable loan programs for nurse educator-track students, Creelman says, will help to fuel the pipeline, as will pay increases to nursing faculty. But these steps won’t be enough to solve the magnitude of the problem, adds Creelman.
"This is a national level issue," says Dr. Raj Pathi, vice president of academic affairs at Becker College in Worcester. Statistics, he says, show that at least 125,000 more students would have entered nursing programs in 2004 if colleges in the country had space to take them.
The nursing program at Becker College in Worcester has more than tripled in size, growing from about 80 students in 2002 to nearly 300 today. "If there was anything we could do to continue to expand that, we would," says Pathi.
Replacing staff in general is always an issue, he adds. "We do know that in the next 5-6 years, we are going to have a fair amount of faculty choosing to do other things with their lives after 30-40 years of teaching."
While academia may not be as financially attractive as clinical nursing, Pathi says, it offers flexibility of scheduling, and the emotional rewards of teaching.
Those are the perks colleges try to sell to recruits, says Creelman. "The reality, however, is that if you are looking at a salary differential of up to $50,000, all of the perks in the world aren’t going to compensate for that differential." K.C.
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