New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Yale New Haven to aid 4 nursing schools
NEW HAVEN — A new partnership between the Yale New Haven Health System and four nursing schools in New Haven and Fairfield counties will bring more than 550 new nurses into the field in the next four years, the institutions announced Thursday.
The initiative, to which Yale New Haven will contribute $1.7 million per year over the next four years, will expand the number of nursing students, faculty and related programs at the nursing schools at Fairfield, Quinnipiac and Southern Connecticut State universities and Gateway Community College.
Yale New Haven Health, which includes five hospitals, has about 6,500 nurses on staff now, a shortage of 700 to 900 nurses, according to Beth Beckman, chief nursing executive for YNHH. The system has seen a severe shortage of nurses and other staff throughout the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 194,500 annual openings for nurses because of retirements, more lucrative positions as “travelers” who don’t stay at one facility for long, and the aging of the population. Meanwhile, more than 80,000 applicants were turned away because of a lack of faculty, clinical sites and other reasons, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. “These schools and their leaders have been legacy partners with us for a long time and have already had a long history of doing incredible work with us. But now we’re going to innovate solutions to age-old problems of a faculty shortage issue and clinical placements, which in health care we’ve struggled with for decades,” Beckman said. “We’re going to bring down those walls and maximize the number of students who are going to graduate in this state,” she said. “In the state of Connecticut, believe it or not, we leave thousands of qualified nursing student candidates who are denied admission because we haven’t solved for those two problems.”
Clinical placements are on-thejob training that nursing students must add to their classroom studies. “Each and every program is different,” Beckman said. “And when we went to our academic colleagues, and we asked, ‘How could we do this? What would it look like? What is your capacity?’ They all came up with different plans, and in some cases, it was, ‘I’ve got plenty of space but I don’t have enough faculty and I need you to work on clinical placements.’ So some of them are dollar costs, and some of them are indirect.”
Meredith Wallace Kazer, dean of Fairfield University’s Egan School of Nursing & Health Studies, said, “This intentionally immerses our students into clinical experience in the Yale New Haven Health System.” Yale New Haven “has generously agreed to offer them scholarships. It’s also an opportunity for Yale to see if Yale is a good fit for them.”
Fairfield will focus the funds on its accelerated 15-month program for students who have a bachelor’s degree in another subject. Other schools have similar programs.
Maria Krol, chairwoman for the Department of Nursing at SCSU, said Southern will focus on increasing diversity of its program, to bring more people of color into the profession but also more men. “I think it really means a lot for our program and also for nursing. … We will increase the diversity access to education, which is really important in today’s climate and for the future. … We want to make sure that our nurses reflect the community that they serve.”
Sandra Bulmer, dean of Southern’s College of Health and Human Services, said the university has devoted much of its scholarship money to students who take courses while in high school and then can graduate with a nursing degree in three years. “And Yale is providing the scholarship support for those students while they’re in that three years of college,” she said. “And
that’s going to be focused on New Haven and this region and these high schools, because that is the students who will be working at Yale living and working in their neighborhoods after they graduate.”
Lisa O’Connor, dean of Quinnipiac’s School of Nursing, said the initiative will give the school “the ability to recruit more nurse educators who are Yale employees? They have qualified nurses at the bedside and who are nurse educators that we can have them assist us in educating the students,” whether in a lecture or clinically.
Also, O’Connor said, Quinnipiac will “give a smoother pipeline for any Yale employee who is interested in becoming a nurse through the Quinnipiac program,” no matter what their current job is. She said the school hopes to add 25 more students, a 25 percent increase, in its accelerated program, in which students “get their bachelor’s in nursing in one very, very full calendar year.”
Sheila Solernou, division director of nursing and allied health at Gateway, said, “Through this initiative, Yale New Haven Health System is investing in the future of nursing and, more importantly, in the future of their employees and Greater New Haven residents who aspire to make a better life for themselves and their families.”
The community college plans to enroll 128 students in the fall, which “will enable additional qualified applicants who are employees of Yale New Haven Health System to realize their own dreams,” Solernou said.