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UALR, St. Vincent partner to address nursing shortage Friday, Jul 11, 2008 By Jason Wiest Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - A busy simulated hospital lab at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock highlighted the nursing shortage that the university and St. Vincent Health System seeks to ease through a five-year partnership officials announced Thursday. In the simulation, nursing students examined a man experiencing heart attack symptoms while across the room, students tended to a woman in labor just steps away from a baby in distress. Two other patients groaned in the background. The patients were fake, but the partnership will help to improve an all-too-real problem in Arkansas that communities nationwide are facing, officials said. St. Vincent will provide $560,000 in scholarships and academic program support over the next five years to help UALR expand and enhance its nursing program. The nation faces a shortage of nearly 1 million nurses by the year 2020, largely because of the aging population, according to Michael Gealt, dean of UALR's College of Science and Mathematics. After hiring 38 registered nurses in June, St. Vincent's system-wide vacancy rate for registered nurses is 10.2 percent, slightly lower than the nationwide vacancy rate, said Brenda Baird, chief nursing executive for St. Vincent Health System. "Increasingly as the baby boomers need health care then obviously there continues to be a need for more and more nurses across the country," Baird said. A wider array of career paths for students also adds to the disparity, she said. Officials say students have become aware of the coming shortage and that interest in nursing has risen. That surge in interest has created a bottleneck at universities, including at UALR, where students have been denied admittance into the nursing program because the university lacked enough funding to accommodate them. "If we didn't have this partnership, we wouldn't be able to double our enrollment in our nursing program," said Anne Schlumberger, chairman of UALR's Department of Nursing. The partnership, which will provide UALR with $64,000 per academic year for five years to expand program offerings, will allow the university to accept an additional 90 students per year into the associate of science program. Previously, the university was able to accommodate 100 students, Schlumberger said. The partnership also will allow UALR to offer accelerated academic programs so that students can obtain degrees in a shorter amount of time and allow the school to offer nursing courses in clinical space at St. Vincent. "I think it's important in these economic times to maximize our resources and share," she said, noting that many students can't afford a nursing education. Under the partnership, 20 scholarships will be awarded annually to students pursuing nursing degrees at UALR, a huge help for students, said Mike Allbritton, a 32-year-old senior nursing student from Hot Springs. "There's so many good people that don't have the opportunity to come into this field because they lack the funds, and it's an expensive program," Allbritton said. "To correct the shortage that's statewide and national, they (scholarships) have to be there." |
