Applying what they learned: Ivy Tech Community College nursing student Jamie LaMaster fills a syringe as fellow student Megan Query practices administering an injection during their nursing lab on Wednesday in the Ivy Tech TechLAB in the industrial park. Tribune-Star/Joseph C. Garza
Learning together: Ivy Tech Community College nursing student Olanike Iji-makinde practices administering an injection as fellow students Ryann Brewster and Malissa Bradley look on during their nursing lab on Wednesday in the TechLAB building in the industrial park.
Tribune-Star/Joseph C. Garza
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Nurses are leaving their jobs in droves throughout the country — the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 500,000 experienced nurses are expected to quit working between now and the end of 2022, creating a shortage of 1.1 million nurses
In the Wabash Valley, colleges are doing what they can to produce nursing students who can take their places.
“Many experts would agree COVID is not the cause of the nursing shortages, but it certainly highlighted them,” said Kim Cooper, Dean of the School of Nursing for Ivy Tech’s Terre Haute and Greencastle campuses.
“We’ve always had shortages and limitations, but if you look at the average age of nurses — they’re in their 50s,” Cooper said. “So for them, it’s a physically difficult job. We have an aging profession where members have been leaving the profession over time, and we’ve known this is going to happen, but COVID sped it up.”
Devastating impact
The coronavirus pandemic has both devastated healthcare professionals and simply burned them out.
“Talking to nurses who have been in nursing for a long time, they would talk about the volume of death, the volume of illness, the fear — the fear that you’re gonna go home and take this to your family,” Cooper said. “That was real. All of those things have impacted us and brought us to where we are right now as a profession.”
“What’s different is we went from respecting and really being grateful for the work of healthcare providers to a sense of disregard for their well-being and their commitment to caring for others,” said Caroline Mallory, Dean of the College of Health and Human Services at Indiana State University.
“And I think that’s been really hard,” Mallory said. “ I have a colleague who says this is the first time that he has felt that his judgment simply was not good enough for people. The scientific evidence for their practices were insufficient for the work they were engaging in and he finds it so frustrating.”
Mallory added, “This is not new — the healthcare field suffers cyclical shortages. I’ve been a nurse since 1985 and seen variations on a theme of shortages. What I see and what I hear from our faculty and students who are practicing is that they are just doing their very best. They feel ethically obligated to be in those clinical spaces and work with clients.”
Dedicated people
“My program is filled with men and women who are dedicated to the cause and this is what they want to do,” Cooper said. “Most of my students come in and they’ve had a long desire to do this. They may have family members who did it. I see a number of them who tell me that they’ve been sick or someone in their family was sick, and they were so blown away by the nursing care and it planted some seeds.”
Nursing School Almanac has ranked Ivy Tech the top nursing school in Indiana two years straight. Ivy Tech is also providing free textbooks for its students, which is particularly important since nursing textbooks are particularly expensive.
“Many people enter nursing because they have a true interest in serving others,” Mallory said. “They feel compelled to make a difference in the lives of other people.”
Maci Houser, a senior at Terre Haute North who will begin classes at Ivy Tech in March, is proof. She hopes to be a trauma nurse. “Knowing you will impact lives on a daily basis really motivates me going forward,” she said. “With nursing, you go the extra mile, but it will pay it forward in the future. Helping people out is all that matters.”
When the pandemic began in early 2020, nursing schools had to adapt on the fly. Many students were learning in clinical settings in local hospitals and nursing homes, and that suddenly wasn’t viable.
“Initially, it was very challenging,” Mallory recalled. “We were well into the semester, students were in clinical settings, and there were still a lot of unknowns about how we were going to manage the pandemic. We didn’t know much about its virulence, about its capacity for how contagious it is. So we shut everything down because we just didn’t know how serious it was going to be. We wanted to be as conscientious as we could be.”
Vigo County has a simulation center, but students could not go there in a group. “Faculty got very creative about taking these real-world cases and making them as real as possible,” Mallory said. They were given flexibility as to what could serve as clinical hours, and even with the modified training, the same number of students passed the licensing examination. “If anything, it created new opportunities to think about what’s the best way to teach people to be nurses.”
The pandemic also gave some nursing students a pause to reconsider their futures.
“During COVID, students said, fairly, ‘I’m not sure I want to do this,’” Cooper said. “And now our students are actively taking care of patients with COVID. “It’s endemic. Just as if someone has cancer or heart disease, our students are expected to take care of them. Early on, there was a little fear factor, a little angst, but if you really want to do this, you really want to be a healthcare provider, it simply becomes something that we have to skill up to, and figure out how to best manage. So it has not deterred us.”
Students sticking with it
Ivy Tech has retained 99% of the students in the healthcare program since the pandemic began.
Mallory reports the same phenomenon at ISU. “Interestingly enough, in our programs, we had a few students who were really quite anxious about continuing as a nursing student — those were relatively rare, and we certainly haven’t seen any diminished interest in the profession,” she said. “Nursing remains a profession that people feel strongly about and have great respect for and believe is worth their time and money.”
Still, COVID-19 has induced some to reconsider professions. Employee Benefit News reported on a survey that found that just 32% of nurses said they are very satisfied with their occupation, compared to 52% who said the same prior to the pandemic. Some 29% of nurses said their desire to leave the field is significantly higher than before the pandemic. And nearly 37% of nurses said they were burned out, stressed or overworked.
In the survey, 97% of respondents agreed and 81% completely agreed that pay increases and other incentives would attract and retain nurses.
“It does beg the question — are we paying nurses what they’re worth?” Mallory said.
To confront the nursing shortage, Indiana House Bill 1003 seeks to grow the nursing pool by allowing eligible associate or bachelor’s degree programs to increase enrollment and eases some statewide licensing restrictions, allowing graduates of foreign nursing schools to be registered or practical nurses in Indiana. The bill advanced in the Indiana House of Representatives last month.
“I am gratified that the legislature is paying attention to the nursing shortage in the state of Indiana and the affects that the pandemic has had on the profession,” Mallory said. “I’m glad to see they’re giving colleges more autonomy to decide how best to conduct the education of nurses.”
And, even with an influx of eager new nursing students, the loss of veteran nurses is worrying.
“Seasoned nurses are experts in their field and have been at the bedside,” Mallory said. “The loss of those nurses is going to have a greater impact than anything we can do to put new nurses in those settings. It’s challenging.”
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