The health field is serious about recruiting nurses.
The Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies founded its Campaign For Nursing’s Future (www.discovernursing.com) in 2002 to “address the most profound nursing shortage in our nation’s history.” By 2025, the company says, there will be a shortfall of about a half-million nurses needed to serve the massive baby boom generation’s needs.
Key to fi nding and training a new generation of caretakers is the availability of programs to educate them. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reports some individuals who want to become nurses are turned not basedon qualifications, but because of a lack of space.
Health education programs, in many cases, don’t have the facilities to handle the demand.
In Northwest Arkansas, a lot of work is going into the effort to educate new nurses for the future. There are two recent examples.
NorthWest Arkansas Community College recently marked the opening of a new 83,000-square-foot Nursing Simulation Lab on its Bentonville campus. The $14.2 million facility houses the nursing, respiratory therapy, physical therapy assistant, paramedic, emergency medical technician, fire science, certified nurse assist and patient care assistant programs.
The program has come a long, long way. Jim Lay, executive director of facilities and construction management, recently told reporter Christie Swanson of his memories when the nursing program started in the early 1990s. It was in a former Western Sizzlin’ restaurant. It’s been at Burns Hall at the community college since 1995.
“The students are finally going to have the lab space they need,” he said.
It makes perfect sense as an educational investment. NWACC President Becky Paneitz noted health care is one of the top five job growth areas in Northwest Arkansas.
We appreciate NWACC’s role in training the health care professionals of tomorrow and the school’s push to expand its capacity to teach them well.
Northwest Technical Institute in Springdale is also doing great work to meet the shortage. The NTI board voted 4-0 to require students who want to be in its licensed practical nurse program to fi rst complete a certified nursing assistants class.
With health professions providing job opportunities, many are being drawn into the training programs. Some are cut out for the job.
Others are not. What NTI did was to require interested students to take a shorter, and much less expensive, class to determine whether the student is (1) serious and (2) capable of handing the sometimes diftcult chores of nursing.
It’s very forward thinking to determine early on whether to continue investing in a person’s skills. If one can’t stand the sight of blood - or worse - it’s better to find out early. The lure of nursing can be strong these days, but nursing needs strong and empathetic people, not quiverers.
It makes perfect sense to weed out people in a $480 class rather than forcing them to pay for the 18-month, $7,900 LPN course. The “if you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen” move, we suspect, will reduce the number of people who drop out late in the training, making the process more eft cient.
Work continues, but these are positive signs Northwest Arkansas’ health care future is getting brighter.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 01/25/2013