UAB does its part for recruiting students

[cougarnurse]

UAB trying number of approaches to recruit nursing students as projected nationwide nursing shortage looms in the next decade - al.com

Lindsay Cokel just started nursing school, and she already has a job lined up.

Cokel, who's working on her bachelor's degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's School of Nursing, will start at Brookwood Medical Center as soon as she graduates. In exchange, Brookwood is helping pay some of her tuition.

Deals like Cokel's are increasingly common as health care providers, nursing schools and others try to figure out how they'll handle a nursing shortage that's expected to hit sometime in the next decade. Experts estimate there's a need for at least a million new nurses nationwide by 2012, but there aren't enough nursing students to fill the gap.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employment for registered nurses - just one type of nurse - was expected to grow 23 percent from 2006 to 2016, mostly because of the aging population and advances in health care that allow more treatments.

To remedy the problem, UAB is recruiting nurses almost anywhere it can: at community colleges, in the professional world and even in rural high schools.

"There's never been a better time to get into nursing," said Doreen Harper, dean of UAB's School of Nursing. "It's so critical, because if we don't have nurses, then health care is compromised."

Recruiters spent a week last month doing presentations at Birmingham-area libraries to try to persuade professionals in other fields to get master's degrees in nursing. In addition, three faculty members have recently received more than $2.5 million in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services for projects designed to broaden the nursing work force. And the school has enrolled 100 students in a new doctoral program aimed at increasing the number of nursing professors.

Driven by projections:

The programs are all driven by federal projections that show an impending shortage of nurses in most states, including Alabama.

"We want these students to make an impact on health in Alabama, to stay here in Alabama," said Beth Stullenbarger, who received a three-year, $867,000 grant to get more minorities, rural students and first-generation college students into nursing. She said minority nurses are needed in part because they're more likely to return to underserved communities, but also because it's important for health care providers to be able to relate to their patients.

The federal government agrees, and stressed the urgency of meeting the shortage and increasing diversity in a report to Congress this year by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration.
"It will not be enough only to increase the supply" of registered nurses, the report reads. "What is needed is adequate numbers of qualified, culturally diverse nurses prepared to practice competently in an increasingly complex health care environment."

To that end, Stullenbarger's team will visit three Alabama high schools to urge students to consider nursing: Birmingham's Carver High, Wilcox Central High School in the Black Belt and Collinsville High School in Dekalb County, where almost half of the students are Hispanic. Representatives will talk to students there about job opportunities and help them with tutoring and course selection so they're ready for nursing school.

The group is also reaching out to two-year nursing students at Lawson State Community College to try to get them to transfer to UAB to get a bachelor's degree in nursing.

Enrichment program:

And Stullenbarger's team has also started an enrichment program designed to help new nursing students stay in school - and, the team hopes, to stay in the state when they get their degree. They get extra help from professors, lessons in time management and study skills, and lectures on rural health and other underserved fields.

Those students include Cokel, who just transferred to UAB after two years of general course work at Auburn University, and Lance Mailloux, a UAB junior who recently started at the nursing school. He's a double target: both male - a minority in the nursing world - and from the rural town of Arley, where the closest hospital is 30 minutes away.

"I want to travel for a year, but I really want to work in Alabama," Mailloux said.

The other two grants also focus on developing more nurses for Alabama, one with a specialty in rural mental health, the other in child health.
At the same time, the school is trying to increase the number of doctoral candidates by introducing a program called the Doctor of Nursing Practice, or DNP. Shorter than the traditional Ph.D., the program lets experienced nurses get the degree they need to become professors.

That's important, Harper said, because many nursing faculty members are nearing retirement and, without replacements, the number of spots available for students at nursing schools will decline when they should be increasing.

"If we don't solve this faculty shortage..." Harper said, her voice trailing off in uncertainty. "Even if nursing schools ramp it up like we're ramping it up here and increase the number of students, we don't even know if we're going to be able to meet the need."