PROVIDENCE – The patients’ needs run the gamut, from managing heart disease, diabetes and other common conditions, to post-traumatic stress disorder, addictions, and grievous war injuries that require amputations, multiple surgeries and extensive rehabilitation work.
Last fiscal year, 166,600 veterans from Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts – from World War II veterans to men and women in their 20s returning from Iraq and Afghanistan – received care at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in Providence.
Skilled nurses are a key part of the Providence VAMC team; the hospital employs 160 to 180, said Deborah A. Clickner, associate director for patient care and nurse executive. And to cover retirements and regular turnover, the center hires about 25 to 30 new nurses each year.
Now, to help ensure that it never lacks for good nurses despite a growing shortage locally and nationally, the VA hospital has formed a partnership with Rhode Island College that will increase the school’s clinical nursing faculty by 10 people and expand enrollment by a quarter.
RIC’s School of Nursing is the 10th in the nation and the second in New England, after Fairfield University in Connecticut, to join the VA Nursing Academy, a $40 million program launched last year to help address the nursing shortage and improve veterans’ medical care.
As part of a four-year commitment, the VA will pay for RIC to hire five new clinical faculty members this academic year and another five next year, and it will increase clinical placements for RIC students at the VA from eight to 16 per semester, to as many as 32.
The new clinical rotations will likely reflect trends in veteran health care, with extra opportunities to work with PTSD patients, for example, said Bonnie Dinwoodie, the VA’s evidence-based practice coordinator and leader of the local partnership on the VA side.
In addition, the VA will use RIC’s nursing resource laboratory to provide simulated learning experiences and assess the skills of its own staff nurses, who receive periodic training as part of their jobs.
The partnership doesn’t require that the new students – an extra 24 starting in January – go work at the VA after they graduate, said RIC Nursing Dean Jane Williams. Currently, only a few of the school’s 100 annual BSN graduates take jobs at the hospital.
However, both Williams and Dinwoodie said they do expect the program to lead more RIC nursing graduates to work at the VA.
“What we’re really trying to create is a supply pipeline, so we never run out of nurses for our veterans,” Dinwoodie said last week.
Increasing the supply of nurses is a major concern nationally and locally. A study by the Rhode Island SHAPE Foundation estimated that by 2010, the state’s supply of nurses would fall short of demand by 25 percent because of retirements, dissatisfied nurses leaving their jobs, and a growing need for nurses to care for an aging population.
RIC, which has the largest BSN program in the state, has grown its nursing enrollment by 30 students in the last four years alone to try to catch up, Williams said. But the school still can’t come close to meeting the demand: for 85 nursing slots this fall, it had 180 applicants.
Through its new public-private VA Nursing Academy, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs hopes to help a total of 12 nursing schools increase enrollment by about 1,000, while also promoting innovation in nursing education.
Williams, the RIC nursing dean, said the partnership not only will allow the school to educate more nurses, but it will also get students involved in research projects and provide them with valuable learning opportunities.
“Even if they don’t end up at the VA hospital, they will all take care of veterans at some point, so being more sensitive to their needs will help them provide better care,” she said. •
For information about the VA Nursing Academy, an effort of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and nursing schools nationwide, visit www.va.gov/oaa.
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Learn More
To learn more about Rhode Island College and its School of Nursing, visit www.ric.edu/nursing.
To learn more about the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Providence, and its five affiliated VA Primary Care Centers in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, visit www.providence.va.gov.
