Broadcast on WLOS, May 24, 2022
Amid an ongoing nationwide nursing shortage, Mission Health is funding instructor positions at three Western North Carolina nursing programs to help graduate more future registered nurses (RN).
"There are over 3 million RN positions open nationally, and certainly, we have not been absolved from that. We are experiencing a shortage, as well," said Fran Paschall, the Division Chief Nurse Executive for HCA Healthcare's North Carolina Division.
There's a total of 446 RN positions open in Mission Health facilities across Western North Carolina. Paschall said she went to local nursing programs to ask what Mission Health could do to help them graduate more nurses.
"I was watching our numbers very closely, and in Western North Carolina in 2020, the schools of nursing graduated 576 students, and in 2021, it was down to 447," Paschall said.
She said the local schools told her instructors were what they needed.
"You have to have one full-time faculty member for every 10 students you admit," Paschall explained.
According to American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) 's report on 2019-2020 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing, U.S. nursing schools turned away 80,407 qualified applications from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2019 due to an insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and budget constraints. Most nursing schools responding to the survey pointed to faculty shortages as a top reason for not accepting all qualified applicants.
Soon, A-B Tech, Blue Ridge Community College (BRCC), and Western Carolina University (WCU) will each be able to admit 10 more nursing students, thanks to Mission Health funding an additional full-time faculty member for each program. That means potentially 30 more nursing graduates in the mountains.
The agreements with A-B Tech and BRCC are for 1-year and 3-years with WCU, but Paschall said they intend to make this a long-term investment and expand it.
"We have to help create that pipeline of people going into healthcare career fields," Paschall said.
In addition to one full-time faculty member for each of the schools, Mission Health is also going to support them with adjunct or clinical faculty. For A-B Tech, it'll be four adjunct faculty members per semester; for BRCC and WCU, it'll be two adjunct faculty members each per semester.
"They prepare to accept students into the clinical arena. They are the ones who will take the students into the nursing unit or the different areas of the hospital and provide direct oversight for them," Paschall said.
"This is the type of partnership that we've needed for quite some time," said Christy Andrews, the nursing department chair at A-B Tech. "The more faculty you have, the more opportunity you have to admit students."
For A-B Tech, this partnership means they'll be able to admit around 150 nursing students each year, many of whom will likely go on to work for a Mission Health facility -- though they don't have to.
"About 85 percent of our graduates do go to work for a Mission facility or an HCA facility in the area," Andrews said.
Andrews said they hadn't had any issues with being able to hire enough full-time faculty members to admit the number of nursing students they've committed to enrolling. However, she said it still can be a struggle to fill those teaching positions.
"There's just a lot they can do out there. I think our funding is such that we aren't competitive with other graduate-level nursing jobs. It's hard to pay a graduate nurse what they would earn in private practice or another facility here," Andrews said.
She said the salary they will be offering the full-time faculty member through Mission Health's investment will be the same as all other nursing faculty at A-B Tech: between $65,000-72,000 a year. Each school in this partnership determined how much money they would need from Mission Health to fund their new faculty position.
Andrews said although there are more lucrative job opportunities for people with graduate-level nursing degrees, being an instructor and teaching future nurses can be a very rewarding and fulfilling profession.
"A nurse educator, if they have a hundred students and those 100 students graduate and go out into the nursing world, they may touch thousands of people. So, now you've got a nurse educator who's had an impact on the care of hundreds of thousands of people," Andrews said.
The instructors are expected to begin teaching at their respective schools this fall.