eLearning: Part of the Nursing Shortage Solution

Healthcare organizations are confronted with an extreme shortage of Registered Nurses, which is expected to grow exponentially through the year 2020. Difficulties in attracting, developing, and retaining, a competent professional nursing workforce challenges our goals for quality and continuity of care at hospitals throughout the United States. Unlike previous cyclical shortages this is a structural shortage. Unless addressed, it will reach crisis proportions, in urban and rural hospitals.

This structural nursing shortage creates tremendous financial burdens on hospital operating budgets. Direct costs of filling a vacant nursing position are 100% of a nurse’s annual salary. These costs do not include softer hidden costs such as liability payments and the "costs of chaos” incurred as a result of having agency nurses providing care in a setting in which they are unfamiliar with the local policies and procedures.

The healthcare industry has typically addressed high RN vacancy rates by accelerating perks for experienced nurses and hiring more new graduate nurses. Perks are costly and result in one facility trying to outdo another, which escalates costs even more. High RN vacancy rates increase the pressure to get new graduates oriented and working as soon as possible. As a result, new graduates are under pressure to perform in life-threatening situations without prior experience. The inability to handle the pressure and resultant stress is reflected in the turnover rates of new graduate RN’s at 35 to 60 percent within the first 12 months of employment.

The Solution?

About five years ago we proposed a unique approach in order to solve the nursing shortage. Recognizing a long identified problem of not having an RN program available to citizens in the Stillwater area, this proposal suggests that the Hospital form a partnership with eLearning Innovations, Inc. located in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The Hospital provides clinical experiences for local students enrolled in the nursing programs that would be provided by partnering institutions and delivered by two-way video as well as courses via Internet and online. Students live in their home community, in this case an medium size Oklahoma Community, and participate in the nursing programs, for the most part using two-way video that originates at the various participating nursing schools.

The Hospital would fund the training of nurse mentors and clinical practitioners that would meet the requirements of the participating institutions. The nursing mentor is responsible for integrating the clinical experiences for local students at the Hospital. After eight months of a pilot program that has focused on developing the educational component between the Hospital and partnering Institution, we believe that with the appropriate modifications, this program will be able to meet the current and future needs of the Hospital and the Oklahoma community.

Therefore, a community-based undergraduate nursing program has been developed and implemented to educate new nursing students who will have the opportunity to live and work in their home community. This program is designed to partner an academic nursing program with a local community hospital for the purpose of increasing the supply of nurses into the workforce which will better serve the community for the near and distant future.

Please have look at this program is has great potential. Thanks, Lorne