Virginia to face future nursing shortage

By 2020, Virginia will experience a 36 percent deficit in the number of registered nurses to meet health care employers, according to the Virginia Partnership for Nursing Web site. The site also states that the national demand for RNs later will climb to 40 percent. “This is a big problem,” said Barbara Brown, vice president of the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association. “We have a workforce of 73 million strong, but we only have a projected 48 million to replace them.”

Terri Gaffney, a registered nurse who serves as vice president of professional and editorial services for the national nursing publication Nursing Spectrum, said this occurred because of the poor planning by health and training services throughout the country.

“We did not do enough in the past to prepare for the impending retirements,” Gaffney said. “And now we’re feeling it.”

Gaffney, a VCU nursing graduate, said she believes recruitment will be the most important tool in alleviating the future shortage.

“There are incentives that schools and hospitals will offer,” she said. “Health care employers need to invest in their workforces. They need to get out there and recruit.”

Joanne Henry, director of VCU’s Community Nursing Organization, said students need to be aware of these incentives.

“Scholarships are readily available to students,” Henry said. “That’s an advantage. VCU Health System offers patient-care positions to students once they’ve completed their first semester of their junior year.”

Henry said these positions can help students earn money and cut their clinical hours at the same time.

“Take advantage of it,” Henry advised potential nursing students.

Based on a comprehensive study by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the areas most affected by the shortage include the highly populated Northern Virginia, which has the highest demand. Central Virginia ranks as second highest, and the predominantly rural Southwest Virginia faces the lowest demand.

“We’re a growing state,” Brown said. “This is a population and economic mandate.”

Hospitals are the largest employer of RNs, hiring an estimated one in four nurses, according to VHHA. Brown said home-health services, however, will require a huge demand for RNs as the workforce grows into retirement age.

“The average age of nursing faculty members range from early to mid-50s,” Brown said. “We really do need more nurses with the right credentials to be available in the next 15 years.”

While aging faculty is one factor contributing to the nursing shortage, another factor concerns nursing schools’ difficulties in expanding its faculty to accommodate higher enrollments.

Henry said this is partly due to the low nursing-school salaries.

“Nursing salaries have gone up fairly dramatically in the last 10 years,” Henry said. “In terms of faculty, the dean places emphasis on salary competitiveness, but faculty have to choose to make less because we are not supported by the state budget to increase salaries.”

Brown suggested universities consider rolling admission policies as one possible solution.

“I believe all waiting lists in Virginia for nursing schools are between one and five years,” Brown said. “Obviously those on the five-year lists are not going to wait around that long, and they could have been the exact type of applicant who would have succeeded in the program.

“Most schools will admit a certain number of applicants once a year. They need to establish rolling admissions where when a few students drop out in the middle of the year, they can fill those empty seats with applicants from the waiting list. We would love to support those types of actions.”

Gaffney suggested universities update their facilities.

“The VCU School of Nursing is still in the same building that I went to school at. The campaign for the new school is a wonderful thing,” Gaffney said. “I have no doubt that a new nursing building with more room, advanced up-to-date technologies and more faculty will increase graduation rates and produce more RNs.”

Henry agrees.

“Having a new building will certainly improve the work environment for our faculty,” she said.

While nursing enrollment figures have remained steady throughout the state, the number of newly licensed nurses has not changed.

“We don’t know what’s happening to these students,” Brown said. “Are they forever circling the hallways? We just don’t know.

“Dropout rates have actually risen in the past few years. We have no data explaining why. What we do know is that there needs to be some kind of innovation that can better predict or select those students most likely to succeed and admit them.”

Lack of standardization among nursing programs also contributes to higher dropout rates.

“Nursing programs are each unique,” Brown said. “Unfortunately, this makes it difficult for students to transfer from school to school or program to program.

“When you’re trying to produce a workforce, you need standardization. Standardization needs to start earlier.”