Sat, May 17 2008
—
By Melissa Dunson
mdunson@joplinglobe.com
MIAMI, Okla. — There are 116,000 unfilled nursing positions in the United States, yet nearly 150,000 potential nurses were turned away last year because there weren’t enough classrooms or teachers for them.
It’s a problem that stretches from education into the economy, and local and state leaders say it will take a multi-organizational effort to change it.
That was the idea behind the Four-State Regional Health Care Summit on Thursday. The event attracted 140 leaders in education, hospitals, city government, and state and local economic development to the Miami Civic Center to look at the problem and potential solutions.
“(The health-care industry) has stayed still when the rest of the world has been moving around us, which has caused us to fall behind in the employment market,” said David Chaussard, chairman of the Northeast Oklahoma Workforce Investment Board, and president and chief executive officer of Claremore Regional Hospital.
It’s a problem that Holley Goodnight, director of adult and postsecondary education for the Carthage (Mo.) Technical Center, deals with all the time.
“The problem isn’t with getting kids interested or placing them in jobs,” Goodnight said. “It’s that we have no place to put them in classrooms.”
Goodnight was among several Southwest Missouri education and health-care representatives who attended the summit.
Goodnight is part of a group trying to create a local one-year program aimed at turning out licensed practical nurses.
That would help out Jane Nelson and her associates. Nelson, the service-excellence coordinator at the Missouri Rehabilitation Center in Mount Vernon, Mo., said her hospital has a nursing shortage like everyone else. The center has a unique challenge, she said, because it is halfway between Springfield and Joplin, two metropolitan areas with multiple hospitals.
“Sometimes that makes it hard for us to pull those nurses in,” she said.
The top five health-care issues identified through group discussion Thursday were retention, recruitment, career pathways, clinical capacity and employee satisfaction.
Speakers representing statewide efforts in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri to unite business and education to deal with the health-care shortage shared possible solutions with the group.
D’Ann Dennis, division chairwoman for health programs at Crowder College in Neosho, Mo., was particularly excited about the ideas put forward by the Kansas City Metropolitan Healthcare Council. The Kansas City group has asked hospitals to donate part of their staff time and schools so bedside nurses can become teachers, and offer real-life experience and mentoring to students and recent graduates.
“We are always fighting a shortage of teachers, and I love this idea,” Dennis said.
The model has been copied in St. Louis since 2005 with success, according to speaker Michael Dunaway, senior vice president of the Kansas City group, and the Missouri Hospital Association is preparing to take at least part of the program statewide.
Cathy Spencer, northeast area system coordinator for the Oklahoma Workforce Investment Board, said information gathered at the summit will be reviewed by a regional committee and included in a plan of action.
Melissa Dunson is the business writer for The Joplin Globe.
Event organizers
The event was organized by the Workforce Investment Boards of Southwest Missouri, Northeast Oklahoma, Southeast Kansas and Northwest Arkansas, and was paid for by a Department of Labor grant the Northeast Oklahoma board received.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.