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Students Turned Away Due to Faculty Exodus

Massachusetts, a longtime leader in nursing education and in overall health care, is facing a looming crisis on both fronts that threatens to leave its aging population with too few nurses to handle skyrocketing demands for care.

Experts say the increasing need for nurses and a decreasing supply of nurse educators could cripple the state’s ability to assist older Bay State residents and contend with an influx of patients now required to have health insurance under state law.

Nursing programs are being forced to turn away interested candidates because of waning numbers of nurse faculty, who are required to have a master’s degree to teach nurses and nursing educators.

“We’ve tapped out in the number of students we can admit. We’re turning students away,” said Nancy Hoffart, dean and professor at Bouve College of Health Sciences Nursing School at Northeastern University.

The increasing demand for nursing faculty, experts say, is caused in part by the mass exodus schools are experiencing as retirements soar, leaving fewer and fewer faculty who meet the elevated teaching standards in nursing expected by the state.

According to the Massachusetts Nurses Association, nursing is the fastest-aging occupation in the United States. More than 50 percent of the state’s 132,841 licensed nurses are in their 50s and will be leaving the work force within 10 years.

The state vacancy rate for nursing faculty, which was at 5 percent in 2006, has surged to 14 percent in the past 18 months, reports the MNA. The rate is expected to continue to rise due to faculty retirements and more students gravitating to clinical posts – which offer competitive salaries and benefits – instead of academia.

The problem is nationwide: The Herald reported in March that more than 30,000 qualified potential nursing students were turned away last year because nursing schools lacked professors to teach them. The crisis was addessed last week in Washington, D.C., at the Nursing Education Capacity Summit, a national conference where representatives of 18 states discussed the nurse faculty shortages around the country.

“We’re encouraging the number of people to enter nursing and then we’re turning them away because we can’t teach them,” said state Rep. Jennifer Callahan (D-Sutton), who is a registered nurse and adjunct professor of nursing at the University of Massachusetts at Worcester.

“There’s an entire initiative in Massachusetts trying to address the (nurse) labor shortage, but we can’t do this without first addressing the faculty issue,” she said. “The median age for nursing faculty is 51, but there have been early retirement incentives among educators and there is nobody to come behind them.”

Nursing student Christie Frazier, 20, who attends Brockton Hospital School of Nursing, said that like many of her peers, she is eager to enter the work force rather than continue education. “I’m going for my bachelor’s after I graduate from this program, and I probably won’t pursue my master’s,” Frazier said. “I want to get out in the field and focus on patient care.”

“The difficulty is acquiring and keeping qualified faculty,” said Catherine Read, associate dean of the Connell School of Nursing undergraduate program at Boston College. “A big problem is salaries. They can make more money in the clinical arena.”

The Massachusetts Association of Colleges of Nursing reported a salary differential between nursing faculty and practicing nurses ranges from $4,000 to more than $16,000 a year.

As supply is decreasing, the threat of increasing demand is palpable.

“At this point, there are 350,000 new people who have signed up for health insurance since the state mandate,” said Dick Powers, spokesman for the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, the board behind the state’s new insurance law.

Among them are some of the nearly 2 million Bay State baby boomers, who will require more care in years to come.

According to a study by the Massachusetts Hospital Association and the Massachusetts Organization of Nursing Executives: “In order to offset the projected gap, students would have to immediately start to choose nursing and nursing education programs would have to increase by 40 percent.”

There were 11,740 enrolled nursing students in the state last year, and serious doubts about academic capacity to teach more.

“It’s a moral compass issue for Massachusetts,” said Callahan, who is pushing legislation to offer incentives to would-be nursing educators. “This is what it’s going to take to make a quality of life for people in the state.”

(c) YellowBrix 2008