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Chandice Covington, Dean, College of Nursing
01/12/06 | The Growing Shortage of Nurses |
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Chandice Covington, PhD, RN, is Dean of the College of Nursing at The University of North Dakota. She was professor of primary nursing care at the University of California Los Angeles, following stints at several other prestigious institutions. She spent the first 12 years of her academic career at Wayne State after receiving a PhD in Nursing from the University of Michigan. Covington was inducted into the American Academy of Nursing in 2004 and has received several service and research awards.
Covington’s research focuses on health promotion and the prevention of poor health outcomes in children, especially in vulnerable populations in the United States and in international settings. Covington is a nationally certified Pediatric Nurse Practitioner.
Q. The growing shortage of nurses globally, including the United States, is a top healthcare and public health story. Several prominent health care journals and magazines have published articles that sound the alarm over the nursing shortage, which is likely to get worse before it gets better, according to NurseWeek.com. What’s your take on the nursing shortage.
A. It’s very real. We’re getting older as a nation, and we need more healthcare. About 100,000 people die in U.S. hospitals annually because of problems in the delivery of care, including failure to rescue, a problem that is related to inadequate numbers of registered nurses assigned to care for increasingly sicker patients.
The problem is even more critical in North Dakota because our population is older than the national average. The nursing shortage is particularly acute in rural areas.
Today’s nursing shortage is complicated by rapidly aging baby boomers, fewer young nurses entering the profession as older nurses retire, and an exodus of nurses into other fields.
Q. How does this nursing shortage affect UND’s nursing program?
A. It’s putting a lot of pressure on our program to produce more nurses.
We want to put better prepared nurses into the workforce because that directly means higher quality care. Currently, we admit 52 nursing students per semester, that is, 104 per year; at any one time, we have 316 RN students in our program. We would like to admit more—we certainly have the qualified candidates. However, space is limited. We cannot admit any more than what we are doing now under very strict guidelines set by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. They set the ratio of one faculty member per eight students in clinical courses. So we have to turn away 40 to 50 qualified students per year.
Also, we are limited by availability of clinical sites. For example, psychiatric care sites, intensive care, and maternity care have limited training availability, even though we are welcomed by the current sites. Very simply, there’s a shortage of that type of care in this area of North Dakota.
A related challenge is attracting and keeping qualified, tenure-track faculty. Right now, we have 40 full-time equivalent faculty, comprising 56 faculty members, in the UND nursing program; 17 of our faculty are PhD prepared. Were very strong, but we want to do much better.
Q. And how is the College of Nursing addressing the issue?
A. I want to significantly upgrade our instructional technology. That includes raising development dollars to purchase 21st century teaching and training technology, including a clinical simulation center with electronic training robots that provide a very realistic training alternative to a real person. The robot, for example, will go into respiratory arrest and will record the actions of the nursing student. The teacher and student can review the tape afterwards. It’s virtual reality training.
We’re also expanding our research and teaching facilities by building the first nursing research facility in the country that will jointly host nursing and psychology researchers. We were awarded nearly $4 million in federal funding to build and operate the Northern Plains Center for Behavioral Research.
This facility will house an integrated program of behavioral and mental health research and research training in nursing, psychology, and counseling which will benefit vulnerable and underserved groups across the life span in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. We want to involve all our students in this research, to prepare them for the future of healthcare.
The new nursing research center will also free up space for the RAIN Program at the College of Nursing, which recently received a $30,000 grant from the Gertrude E. Skelly Foundation. RAIN (Recruitment and Retention of American Indians into Nursing) will move into vacated space in the nursing building, allowing faculty and staff to offer additional service to students.
With the current nursing shortage reaching critical levels, we need all students to reach learning goals. Sometimes something very simple—a paid medication for your child or being able to work fewer hours to make ends meet—can change the course for a worthy student.
We’re also encouraging more men to apply to our nursing and to our nurse anesthetist programs.
Q. You’ve talked about the challenges that the nursing profession faces. Now what’s the most encouraging news on the nursing shortage front as far as the UND College of Nursing?
A. I’d have to say that it’s the team spirit in this (College of Nursing) building. There’s a lot of it here. People in this school are very eager to help each other get ahead. That’s a major plus for us.
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