|
NEWS
| October 7, 2003
Nursing
Nursing school is ‘stretched’
to capacity
Officials face a Catch-22: They
need faculty, but fieldwork pays more.
By Mindy
Hutchison
Contributor to The Shorthorn
The School of Nursing is running at capacity to address a nationwide
shortage of nurses, but officials say keeping qualified faculty
to teach the growing number of students is difficult.
Nursing officials said they want to expand the program to further
combat the shortage. But enrollment, up 19.7 percent from last fall,
has created what officials said they fear is a Catch-22.
Suzan Kardong-Edgren, director of the bachelor of science in nursing
program, said the school cannot expand its upper-level enrollment
because it does not have enough faculty.
But the school can’t hire faculty without funding and can’t
bring in more students without more faculty, said Jean Ashwill,
Nursing undergraduate student services director.
“We’re taking as many students as we can,” Ashwill
said. “We’re stretched as far as we can stretch.”
The school hired three faculty this year in addition to replacing
13 who retired or left the university. The school launched its doctoral
program this fall to address a national nursing shortage. Nursing
Dean Elizabeth Poster said next year, the school will admit 100
students into the undergraduate program but the nursing shortage
remains.
“The nursing shortage in Texas is projected to continue over
the next 10 years, and even if UTA and the entire state of Texas
doubled the number of BSN and ADN prepared students graduating,
that would only result in an additional 5,000 new registered nurses,”
Dr. Poster said.
The nursing shortage is not going to be solved soon, Kardong-Edgren
said, and UTA’s graduates are just a “drop in the bucket.”
Poster said part of the problem in retaining and attracting faculty
is their salaries.
Nursing faculty earn starting salaries of $40,000 to $45,000 for
nine months, about the same as a new bachelor of science in nursing
or associate degree in nursing graduate would earn in 12 months
with no experience, she said.
A nurse at a hospital with about the same level of experience as
a UTA nursing faculty, depending on credentials and his or her role
at the hospital, would make between $70,000 and $80,000, Poster
said.
Kardong-Edgren said nurses teach because they love teaching. Her
students will soon make more money than she does, she said.
“We do have faculty who teach for a while and leave because
money is a primary factor,” Assistant Dean Josie Lu O’Quinn
said.
Poster said factors including funding, scheduling and hiring new
faculty would go into increasing enrollment. It’s hard to
say how much money would be needed to hire new faculty, she said.
“If we had additional faculty, additional clinical placement
sites in hospitals and other health care settings, as well as additional
practice equipment and practice lab sessions before students actually
provide care to real patients, we would be able to increase our
enrollment,” Poster said.
She said enrollment went up this semester because of new program
requirements. Freshmen and sophomores could now declare nursing
as a major, which was reserved before for upper-level students.
Freshmen are taking an Introduction to Nursing course and have the
opportunity to take a service learning course next semester, she
added. Sophomores can now take Pharmacology, Pathology and Nursing
Concepts — previously reserved for juniors, Poster said.
Upper-level courses, though, cannot be expanded because there are
not enough faculty.
Dr. O’Quinn said the nursing shortage rose for several reasons.
Many nurses, 40 percent, don’t work in hospitals anymore.
People are also living longer and thus require more care than they
previously did, she said.
Kardong-Edgren said the government has not done enough to address
the shortage. She said officials might take notice though, “when
it starts hitting the congressman — when their parents are
in the hospital, and there’s nobody there to take care of
them.”
|
|
|
| Elizabeth
Poster, Nursing dean, says part of the problem
with retaining faculty is the salary UTA pays.
|
|
|
