ARCHIVED October 15, 2004 12:00:00 am

Health-care consortium targets nursing shortage

By Steven Olson

There is a widespread belief that if you are in health care, you can get a job just about anywhere in this country.
In fact, the United States is going to need nurses – lots of them. Hospitals and clinics are already short 110,000 nurses as of 2003. And Colorado will need 10,000 nurses within the next several years, according to a white paper written in March by the Front Range Healthcare Leadership Consortium.
The consortium, a joint effort of regional community colleges, hospitals and health care centers, has formed to address a related problem: not enough instructors to teach future nurses.
“I did an interview the other day,´ said Glenn Good, the dean of career and technical education at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins. “I had this woman who’d been in nursing for a while and really wanted to teach nursing. She was all set to go and then I told her what we could pay her and it was less than 50 percent of what she was making at the hospital and you could see the air go out of her.”
This is not a rare occurrence. Couple the pay issue with the fact that the classrooms used to teach nursing are more expensive to equip. As a result, schools start running out of classrooms because they aren’t covered by the budget and you get waiting lists for nursing programs. A progress report of all the community colleges on the Front Range dated Sept. 8, 2004, says there is a waiting list of 3,490 applicants.
Even if all those applicants were being taught right now, it would still not be enough.
Here’s the problem: Demographically, the baby boom generation is huge, stretching from 1947 to 1964. Like everything else, it’s aging. Right now, the oldest of the generation is 57. That translates into a very big demand for nursing care that will only increase over the next 20 years.
“There is a 10,000-nurse shortfall being projected for the Front Range,´ said J.J. Johnston, president of the Northern Colorado Economic Development Corporation in Loveland. Johnson said his organization is involved because the entire affair has big employment possibilities – not just in the hiring of doctors and nurses, either.
“They spin off a lot of jobs, from the people who change sheets, to baking bread to the people who do open-heart surgery,” Johnston said.
In its formative stages, the nursing education consortium has brought together Front Range Community College, Aims Community College, the University of Northern Colorado and Regis University, all of which contribute to nursing training. The schools are joined by local hospitals such as Boulder Community Hospital, Longmont United Hospital, McKee Medical Center in Loveland, Platte Valley Medical Center in Brighton, and Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins.
“We have already seen some changes,´ said Yvonne Myers, health systems coordinator at Columbine Health Center in Fort Collins, another member of the consortium. “We already have the grant,” she said, referring to a $297,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment to Front Range Community College.
“We know what the problems are but so far we have just had band-aid efforts at solving them.” The job of the consortium is going to try and address them with what Myers calls “one strong voice.”
Good said that the next meeting of the consortium will be Oct. 15. “We will see where we are going from there,” Good said. “We are definitely interested in the [state] legislature.”
Good says one of the consortium’s goals is to approaching the state for more money so that they can offer prospective nursing instructors a better salary. That way he can break the bottleneck in education.
“(FRCC) had a 30 percent increase in nursing graduates in the last year,” Good said. “We had a huge waiting list too. We had jobs for them. We just can’t get (enough of) them through.”
According to the consortium’s report “entry-level nursing faculty with a master’s degree earn the same or less than a new nurse with an associate degree.”
Futhermore, the average age of nursing faculty is in the mid 50s, which underlines the need to attract more teachers.
Another goal is to make sure that the nursing graduates are conversant with the latest in medical technology.
Additionally, the consortium wants to further screen people who want to enter the medical profession to make sure the right people are finding the right jobs. “There are a lot of needs for nurses right now,´ said Myers. “If you’re in it, you’re going to be working with a lot of people and that has to be a part of your soul. If it isn’t, then even if you’re getting paid $50,000, it’s not enough.”