Putting money into training healthcare professionals is not a bad thing, but it shouldn’t be looked at a cure all. It is far from it, and funding for education is not the cause of many of the personnel shortages seen in healthcare–far from it. For example, one of the greatest shortages is in attracting and keeping certified nurses aides in long term care. In some places, the turnover rate is about 80% at one year. This has nothing to do with education funding—rather, it is pathetic pay for doing a very hard job. And often being treated very poorly.
And nursing, well, that is like a vinyl record that keeps skipping. Putting all the focus on education funding is safe. No toes stepped on, no angry hospital execs, no real changes needed. In fact, hospital execs would love it if 10 times the number of nurses were churned out of the education assembly line. That would raise competition and they can lower wages and make working conditions even worse than they are. Nurses would lose all leverage.
From Advance for Nurses:
The legislation, signed into law by President Obama Feb. 16, includes $500 million for health professions training. During the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years, $300 million of this funding will go to the National Health Service Corps. The remaining $200 million will be divided between Nursing Workforce Development Programs (Title VIII programs) and Health Professions Training Programs (Title VII programs).
That’s good, that more than half the money is going to the National Health Services Corps. I have no problem with that and these programs need more funding. So that gets a checkmark from me (not that Obama asked). But its the other money that’s problematic.
How much money is nursing going to get out of the $200 million? And who are the “others?” What other health professions are they talking about? Is money going to go to train pharmacists, pay for doctoral degrees for physical therapists, pay for tech education, pay for certification of CNAs, or what?
Now the good part, although it is difficult to say how accurate this is. They are also only quoting a nurse faculty member from one school, rather than someone who be more intimately involved with distributing and allocating the funding.
Funding also may be used to support nursing diversity scholarships, as well as nurse faculty scholarships. Walker said lack of nursing faculty continues to be an obstacle in addressing the current nursing shortage. “Thirty percent of nursing faculty positions in the U.S. are not filled,” she said.
The funding also will support grants for clinical educational equipment. Walker said this would include clinical simulation equipment that allows for the expansion of some nursing educational capacity without the need for more faculty.
Yes, that’s great. Nursing diversity scholarships, what a cool and oh-so politically correct idea. True, most nurses are still white females, but really, are most minority men and women not going into nursing because they don’t have the money to go to school? Or is it because its just not that much of an attractive profession. And if the latter is the case, they will take the scholarship money, get an education, and then use nursing as jumping board to where they really want to be. Plus I find these kinds of scholarships discriminatory, but that’s another story.
And what are “faculty scholarships?” Is that a scholarship to increase the pay of a faculty member, or money to pay for an education–and the nurse swears on the life of her firstborn that she will teach for 2 years? I think the idea of paying for graduate education in exchange for devoting XX number of years to teaching is a good idea, but it is, like most of these great ideas, simply a bandaid. Chances are, the nurse with a graduate level education is going to fly the coop into a much higher paying job. There’s a reason why there’s a faculty shortage, and the primary one is pay. The secondary one is that the academic world can be very unfriendly, very political, and a nurse had hordes of other opportunities.
My favorite use of the money is “clinical simulation equipment.” I think that is great to give nursing students more clinical time, but not to be used in lieu of actual clinical time==like with real patients and an instructor. However, the person quoted here seems to think that this is the miracle that can help stretch teachers. Sorry, not a good idea. Nurses have limited time in the clinic as is, and simulation is not a viable solution.
All in all, a very depressing article. Full of the usual band-aid approaches and politically correct solutions, and vagueness so typical of this type of reporting.
