With care shortage growing, local colleges are expanding programs and cranking up new ones designed to get as many nurses into the workforce as quickly as possible
By Cristina Bolling
The Charlotte Ledger
Jessica Nichols emerged from college with a bachelor’s degree in communications with her sights set on a broadcast journalism career. But after spending six years in the U.S. Army and becoming a mom, she felt called to an entirely different work path — nursing.
Now, Nichols is one of seven students in Johnson & Wales University’s new nursing program that started in May on the Charlotte campus. If all goes according to plan, she’ll be eligible to sit for her registered nurse licensure exam in August 2025 and get a job in the specialty that most interests her: pediatric psychiatry.
Nichols, 29, and her six Johnson & Wales classmates have all already earned bachelor’s degrees, so they’re on what the industry calls an “accelerated” training path, which means a speedier process that involves only nursing-focused coursework.
Once they’ve got their credentials in hand, they’ll be in high demand.
Experts predict a shortfall of 12,500 registered nurses in North Carolina by 2033. Nurses were already leaving the profession in droves before COVID, and the pandemic accelerated the problem. That’s compounded by a shortage of nurse educators, which makes ramping up the next generation more difficult.
Registered nurses Victoria Williams (l) and Sheree Hayes (r) who both work in North Carolina were in Washington, D.C., in May 2022, with their nursing school friend Lucy Hudson (middle) to demonstrate for better working conditions for nurses. The women said that too few staff create conditions for medical errors. Credit: Rose Hoban/NC Health News
“We cannot produce nurses as quickly as nurses are leaving the bedside, either for retirement or just because. For a lot of nurses, … COVID was the final straw for them,” said David Hudson, director of Johnson & Wales Charlotte’s nursing program.
Johnson & Wales is just one of a number of Charlotte-area colleges starting or amplifying their nursing programs. Others include:
UNC Charlotte announced last month that it will receive $2.4M in UNC system grants to boost the number of nursing students in both its undergraduate and graduate programs. It will start an accelerated four-semester bachelor of science in nursing program in the fall of 2025. Between 2022 and 2024, UNC Charlotte increased the number of undergraduate nursing students from 100 per year to 128 per year, and the $2.4M from the UNC system grants will allow the school to continue to increase enrollment by another 31%, adding another 40 nursing students annually by 2027, university officials told The Ledger.
Central Piedmont Community College announced in January that it was expanding its associate degree in nursing program from 200 to 300 students starting last May, and increasing the size of its practical nursing program from 24 students to 64 students. (Licensed practical nurses provide basic medical care under the supervision of a registered nurse or doctor.)
Last year, Johnson C. Smith University announced a partnership with Northeastern University’s Charlotte campus to take foundational required classes at JCSU before transferring to Northeastern’s accelerated bachelor of nursing, master of public health or master of applied behavioral analysis programs.
In 2021, the Carolinas College of Health Sciences, which is a public nonprofit college run by Atrium Health, revived its certified nursing assistant program, which many use as a first step for obtaining an associate or bachelor’s degree in nursing.
Trish Richardson, president of the N.C. Nurses Association, called the new program announcements “exciting,” and said she applauds the Charlotte schools for “stepping up.”
“What I’m seeing is excitement and energy around finding the ways to get it done,” Richardson said. “They’re recognizing that we need a strong pipeline of nurses, or we aren’t going to be able to serve” all who need to be served.
Can’t just open the floodgates
Even if a tidal wave of people wanted to suddenly train to become nurses, raising the nursing stock isn’t that easy.
The pay scale for nurse educators is far lower than that for highly skilled nurses in clinical settings, making it hard to recruit faculty to train new nurses, Hudson said. So college programs often have a hard time hiring enough teachers to meet demand.
Nurses with master’s degrees can make upwards of $100,000 a year working with patients, so it’s hard to convince highly trained nurses to work as teachers at community colleges, for example, “where they’re making maybe — maybe — $60,000,” Hudson said.
Richardson, who is a registered nurse, said she is going back to school this fall for her doctorate degree with the goal of becoming a nurse educator. But she said it’s a career move many can’t afford to take, given the possibility of income loss.
Another complicating factor that hampers the growth of nurse training programs is that nursing programs need to offer their students clinical experience in local hospitals, doctors offices and medical clinics, to give them hands-on experience outside of classrooms.
But already-swamped medical settings don’t always have the capacity to have large numbers of rotating nursing students and teachers underfoot, Hudson said. So nursing education programs often have to limit their sizes based on how much capacity they have for clinical rotations.
(Johnson & Wales students, for example, rotate through Novant Health Charlotte Orthopedic Hospital one day a week, and in coming semesters they’ll rotate through an addiction treatment center, a mental health clinic and a local jail.)
Johnson & Wales Charlotte students pay $61,000 for the 4-semester, 16-month program, although students in the group that started in May and the next group that starts in January receive a $15,000 scholarship from the university, Hudson said.
More accelerated programs
Richardson, of the N.C. Nurses Association, said she was a stockbroker before deciding 20 years ago to go into nursing, and she recalls that there was only a handful of accelerated programs statewide that allowed students who already have bachelor’s degrees to complete their nursing training at a faster pace.
She completed a two-year associates degree in nursing that qualified her to become a registered nurse. Nowadays, aspiring nurses who already have a bachelor’s degree can enroll in a program like the one at Johnson & Wales, which lasts 16 months.
(However students do their training, all must sit for the same qualifying exam to become a licensed nurse. Many students must complete science- and math-related prerequisite classes they might not have taken in their bachelor’s coursework before they can enter an accelerated nursing program.)
Richardson said she has served as a preceptor, or a trainer and mentor, to accelerated nursing students in her career, and is always impressed by the different skills and backgrounds they bring to the profession.
“Their passion is palpable. They know they want to serve others and they want to take another, different journey,” Richardson said.
The post With care shortage growing, local colleges are expanding programs and cranking up new ones designed to get as many nurses into the workforce as quickly as possible appeared first on North Carolina Health News.
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