Solving the Nurse Workforce Shortage in Midland
Nurses, the lifeblood of our healthcare systems, are in increasingly short supply signaling a code red for the Texas Legislature currently meeting in Austin. If you or a family member need or will need care in a Texas hospital, nursing home, home care program, clinic, rehabilitation or behavioral health hospital, the State Comptroller warns the shortage might affect the timely availability of that care. The stresses of the pandemic and retirement of baby-boomer age nurses have left the healthcare system with fewer nurses to provide direct patient care and fewer experienced nurses to train the next generation of nurses providing care in Midland.
Nurse educators surveyed by the Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies identify the top two challenges to training more nursing students as a shortage of preferred clinical training opportunities at hospitals and other care sites and a shortage of qualified nurse faculty at nursing schools.
Fortunately, two bills filed this session will help, if they become law. Senate Bill 2590 and House Bill 3930 will support hospitals and other clinical training sites in educating, supporting, and retaining nurses. These bills will fill the missing piece in Texas’ nursing workforce funding strategy – investment in the clinical sites that educate nurses and that are deploying innovative delivery and operations models to retain, advance, and support existing nurses.
Traditionally, the state has funded only nursing schools and the classroom component of nurse education, and not the clinical training sites themselves. These clinical sites, most frequently hospitals, partner with nursing schools and community colleges to educate future nurses and provide bedside, hands-on education constituting approximately one-third of nursing students’ needed educational hours. Indeed, the Texas Senate’s and House’s versions of the state budget bill already include more funding for nurse education. They propose increasing funding for the Nursing Shortage Reduction Fund by $18 million to support more student financial aid.
This increase in funding is important and should be maintained. But, meeting the growing need for new nurses and supporting and retaining experienced nurses requires investments in both didactic (classroom) and experiential (clinical site, bedside) education.
Specifically, SB 2590 and HB 3930 will address clinical site education gap by:
- Funding pay increases for preceptors – the staff nurses who take on the extra responsibility of mentoring, advising, and teaching nursing students at the bedside. Without these preceptors, nursing students lack hands-on, real-world patient care experience essential for successfully completing nursing school and passing nurse licensure exams, and Texas can’t grow its nurse workforce.
- Creating and funding nursing innovation and coordination grants for clinical sites. Similar to existing grant programs that support classroom innovation, clinical innovation grants would support hospitals and other clinical sites in piloting and testing new approaches to retain and support nurses in their workplaces, including new workflows, use of technology, staffing models, and retention and mentoring strategies to support nurses to keep providing critical patient care.
- Creating and funding clinical nurse faculty grant programs to support both practicing nurses who want to teach part-time and faculty who want to work part-time in clinical settings. These grant programs would ameliorate the current shortage of nursing faculty and promote integration of the didactic and clinical training students need.
A complete nursing education requires both classroom and clinical site components…both didactic and hands-on learning. Supporting only the academic side of the equation by itself will not solve the nurse workforce shortage in Midland nor support those nurses already in the workforce. We need to re-frame healthcare as essential infrastructure and nurses as foundational to that infrastructure and align public investments in their education and retention accordingly. Passage of HB 3930/SB 2590 will go a long way to positioning Texas as a leader in addressing the nurse workforce shortage and making Texas one of the best places in the country to be a nurse