Instructor Tamara Baird, right, works with students Anna Mary Schaedle, Jessica Blankenship and Miriam Blizzard on Thursday in a post-partum hemorrhaging scenario during a class in Belmont University’s nursing program. / DIPTI VAIDYA / THE TENNESSEAN

Click the link below to see the full story in the March 5th Tennessean:
TN is short on nurses, and those to teach them
Written by Tom Wilemon

Tennessee needs more nurses, especially ones with advanced degrees, but the kink in the pipeline lies in the classroom.
Last year, 3,000 nursing school applications never made it past the admissions office because there wasn’t enough teaching faculty. The state, with the support of nursing organizations, has set up an education loan forgiveness program to lure nurses into teaching, but half of that money is already spent.
Health planners are counting on nurses with advanced degrees to meet increased demands for care as baby boomers age and millions of previously uninsured people obtain coverage. Nurses also are expected to fill the void in primary care as physicians increasingly choose to go into specialized medicine.
“You can give people a health insurance card, but you can’t guarantee that they can get an appointment,” said Colleen Conway-Welch, dean of the school of nursing at Vanderbilt University. “One of the things that I think is terribly important is to determine the role of how advanced practice nurses can be even more helpful in solving that problem.”
The Institute of Medicine, in conjunction with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has mapped out a plan for doing that. It calls for giving more authority to nurses and increasing their education. The national goal is to increase the percentage of registered nurses with four-year degrees from the current level of 50 percent to 80 percent by 2020. The “Future of Nursing” report also called for more advanced degrees.
Profession is evolving
The doctor whom people go to for primary care in the future could actually be a nurse with a Doctor of Nursing Practice, or DNP, degree.
“It’s going to happen,” said Sharon Adkins, executive director of the Tennessee Nurses Association. “It’s not legislated. It’s just the way that the profession is moving.”
Besides the need for more nurse practitioners, nurse midwives and clinical nurse specialists, demands also will increase for all nurses. About 3 million nurses are practicing in the United States, and at least 900,000 of them are older than 50.
Tennessee has basically two options for producing more nurses: establish new schools or expand the capacity at existing ones. From 2009 to 2011, the Tennessee Board of Nursing has approved seven of eight applications for startup programs. In Nashville, they included associate degree programs at MedVance Institute, ITT Technical Institute and Nashville State Community College.
Three of the seven were baccalaureate programs, including one approved last month for Christian Brothers University in Memphis that will allow existing RNs to upgrade their educational levels. Freed-Hardeman University in West Tennessee and Lincoln Memorial University in East Tennessee also have added baccalaureate programs.
There are 46 schools of nursing in the state, offering 70 different programs, ranging from licensed practical nurse training to doctorate-level degrees. The Tennessee Board of Nursing is particular about schools that apply. Graduates of RN programs in Tennessee had the highest passage rate on the national nursing exam than those from any other state in 2010. Tennessee has ranked first or second for the past five years.
Cost-effective choice
Elizabeth Lund, executive director of the Tennessee Board of Nursing, said increasing the capacity of existing programs is more cost-effective than starting a new one from scratch.
“The biggest challenge is the faculty shortage,” Lund said. “There is more competition for the nurse who has prepared at the graduate level, who may have in the past been drawn to a nursing faculty position.”
Advanced practice nurses can make between $75,000 and $100,000 fresh out of school, Conway-Welch said. The state nursing community, led by the Tennessee Nurses Association, raised $1.4 million for a forgivable loan program for nurses with advanced degrees who agreed to teach.
Since fall 2007, the Graduate Nursing Loan-Forgiveness Program has helped fund the education of 245 nurses. The first half of the fund, which is administered by the Tennessee Student Assistance Corp., has been spent.
“The first couple of years of this program was actually being funded by private dollars,” said Naomi Derryberry with TSAC. “Eventually, this program is going to do what it was set out to do, make it to where there will be nursing educators across the state, so those students who wish to pursue nursing will have a classroom,” she said.