Faced with a crippling staffing crisis at local hospitals, professors at Rhode Island’s public colleges say it’s time to solve a long-standing problem with the pipeline of health care professionals: a shortage of nursing faculty, which keeps scores of prospective students on waiting lists.
“Having an adequate workforce is difficult to do when there is a limited pool of nursing faculty to prepare them,” said Barbara E. Wolfe, dean and professor at the University of Rhode Island College of Nursing. “We need to attract nurses to the faculty role to truly address the current shortage. I wish it was simply a matter of adding positions. Unfortunately, it is a bit more complex.”
Industry leaders and nursing school academics from URI, Rhode Island College and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing say more needs to be done by the government to support the development of nursing faculty.
The need for more nursing educators persists amid a staffing crisis at hospitals that’s become so severe that Gov. Daniel J. McKee recently deployed the R.I. National Guard to support health care professionals overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases. In a temporary effort to alleviate the situation, nursing school graduates have been allowed to forgo final exams for 120 days to dive directly into the workforce.
“The focus during COVID has understandably been on training more nurses to work on the front lines, but … we need to incentivize more of them to pursue advanced degrees,” said Carolynn Masters, dean of the Zvart Onanian School of Nursing at RIC.
The vacancy rate is now at a 10-year high in Rhode Island for full-time nursing faculty positions that require doctorate degrees, with nine such positions unfilled throughout the state as of October 2021 at schools with a bachelor’s degree nursing program, including RIC, URI and Salve Regina University, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. There were no vacancies in 2015.
‘I wish it was simply a matter of adding positions.’
BARBARA E. WOLFE, University of Rhode Island College of Nursing dean and professor
Wolfe pointed out that this data only captures full-time vacancies, not the many vacancies for part-time faculty or preceptors integral to clinical education. The data also doesn’t reflect the many vacancies in associate degree programs. The Community College of Rhode Island is currently trying to hire seven more full-time faculty members.
A survey released by the AACN in October 2019 identified 1,637 faculty vacancies at 892 nursing school programs nationwide, a vacancy rate of 7.2%. The report noted that an additional 134 faculty positions need to be established to accommodate demand.
The driving factors behind the nursing faculty shortage include job competition from clinical health care facilities that often pay more, financial constraints facing schools and graduate students, and a teacher talent pool that’s edging close to retirement age, according to the AACN report. The average doctorally prepared nursing faculty member in Rhode Island is 57 years old.
“What the nation is experiencing is really a result of long-standing lack of attention to the development of the nursing workforce,” said Betty Rambur, a professor and Routhier chairperson for practice at the URI College of Nursing, where there are three faculty vacancies. “Most nurses enter graduate school with at least some student debt. You add on that more debt from a master’s degree and a doctoral degree, and then to start out at a lower salary. It just isn’t viable.”
According to a survey done by the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, the average salary of a nurse practitioner is $110,000. In contrast, the average salary for an assistant professor in nursing was $79,444 in 2020.
State data shows annual salaries for many of the associate professors at Rhode Island’s public universities and colleges can be less than $60,000. Many make less than $70,000.
The federal government doesn’t do enough to make the education track for nursing faculty more affordable, Rambur says.
Masters agrees. RIC’s nursing program is trying to cultivate new faculty from its own pool of graduates, recruiting them into a doctor of nursing practice program, but she says the government needs to do more.
Rhode Island colleges received $744,121 in funding from the Title VIII Nursing Workforce Development Programs in fiscal 2020, for scholarships and loan repayment programs. The National Institute of Nursing Research provided $1.8 million during that year, according to data provided by the AACN.
On top of federal funding, other states have made efforts to support higher education for nurses, according to the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. For example, the organization noted, the Maryland Higher Education Commission announced two years ago that it’s granting $29.3 million to 14 schools of nursing in an effort to increase the size of their faculties.
McKee’s office noted that the governor’s budget proposal includes an $800,000 expansion of the state’s Wavemaker Fellow program, which provides student loan repayments for workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Nursing instructors are eligible.
“Clearly, one of the challenges is that really, until this pandemic, nursing has been so invisible in our country, except when we are in need of care, like so many of us are right now,” Rambur said.
Marc Larocque is a PBN staff writer. Contact him at Larocque@PBN.com.
