Valley nursing shortage near crisis
Fresno Bee 5/10/07
The prognosis is grim: a dearth of nurses to care for a growing and aging population, and a short supply of faculty to teach new nurses.
By 2020, the Valley will be short by as many as 20,000 nurses, said Mary Barakzai, lead author of the report "Crisis in Care: The Nursing Shortage in the San Joaquin Valley."
"This is really a dire situation," said Barakzai, an associate professor of nursing.
The nursing shortage will cause delayed surgeries, emergency room diversions of patients when hospitals don't have staff and closed hospital beds, she said.
Already, most areas of the Valley lag far behind the national average of one nurse for every 120 people and the state average of one for every 160.
Merced County fares the worst, with one nurse for 400 people. Kern County has one nurse per 300 residents. Tulare County has one nurse per 230 people.
In the combined areas of Fresno and Madera counties, there is one nurse per 150 people.
The gap between supply and demand for nurses is expected to skyrocket in the next 13 years, according to the report by the Central California Center for Excellence in Nursing at California State University, Fresno, which had its grand opening Tuesday night.
The Valley's population will grow by a half-million new residents, an increase of 50% -- almost twice the state average of 28.8%, the nursing report said.
Two groups that consume the most health care -- the young and the old -- are expected to almost double in size in that period.
An estimated 571 new nurses will be needed every year for the next six years to maintain status quo in the Valley.
But the Valley faces challenges in providing new nurses.
Barakzai said nine nursing education programs can graduate 800 new nurses each year. But only one in two qualified students are admitted to the nursing programs because of a lack of instructors and the space to teach them.
There's no shortage of people who want to become nurses, said Harmandeep Deol, a December graduate of the nursing program at Fresno City College.
"I don't think we have enough schools and enough faculty for the students to get into the program," Deep said during a break from her shift on a cardiology floor at Community Regional Medical Center in downtown Fresno.
Carolyn Drake, interim director of nursing at Fresno City College, said her program admitted 50 people by a lottery to the program this year.
An additional 600 people who applied for admission were not selected, she said.
Finding faculty to teach the students is the main stumbling block to admitting more students, Drake said.
"I can't even find a nursing director," she said.
Recruiting nursing faculty will remain a problem until salaries are increased, said Kathleen Curtis, associate dean of the College of Health and Human Services and co-author of the nursing report.
"Often our graduates end up in positions at a higher salary than some of our faculty," Curtis said.
And as faculty age and retire, replacing them will become more crucial, Curtis said.
The average age of nursing instructors in the Valley is 49 years, and they are retiring at a rate of 1% to 2% a year, according to the report.
Nurses who want to return to school to become instructors must leave the Valley to pursue doctoral degrees, Curtis said.
The minimum requirement for full-time nursing faculty in California is a master's degree in nursing and at least one year of experience as a registered nurse.
A doctorate is required to teach in a bachelor's degree nursing program, such as the one at Fresno State.
Solving the nursing shortage will require long-term strategies, the nursing eductors said.
Among the suggestions in the report by the Central California Center for Excellence in Nursing:
Educational stipends for nursing faculty.
Long-distance learning to improve accessibility to graduate programs for nursing faculty.
Mentoring new nursing graduates to encourage retention of nurses.