Blues grant seeks Fla. nursing shortage solution

David Gulliver - posted 12:15 pm Wednesday, Aug. 19

Florida’s impending nursing shortage may find a innovative solution in a $500,000 initiative announced Tuesday.

The Blue Foundation for a Healthy Florida, the philanthropy arm of insurer Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, was one of 10 groups nationwide awarded a grant aimed at addressing the shortage.

The $250,000 two-year grant came from Partners Investing in Nursing’s Future, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Northwest Health Foundation. The Blue Foundation is matching it with another $250,000, a condition of the grant. The money will go toward promoting the use of patient simulation technology in nurse training.

A widely-cited federal study shows Florida will have a bigger nursing shortage than any states except California and Texas. It stems from an aging patient population that will need hospital, nursing home and hospice care, and from nurses aging as well -- in January, the average age of a Florida registered nurse was 48, and that figure has risen steadily.

Using the federal methodology and the state’s own data, the Florida Center for Nursing estimates that by 2020, the state will need about 216,803 full-time nursing positions by 2020, but will have only 164,594 filled.

Because those are full-time equivalent spots, and many nurses work art-time, they anticipate needing some 70,000 trained people for the jobs.

But Florida’s nursing schools now are turning away qualified applicants -- more than 10,000 in the 2007-08 academic year -- because of a series of bottlenecks.

Some schools lack funding to hire nursing faculty, and other with funds simply can’t find teachers, said Mary Lou Brunell, executive director of the Florida Center for Nursing, which will conduct the effort.

Another problem, though, is that nursing students need hands-on training in hospitals and other clinical settings, and that creates another bottleneck. “The educational programs just do not have access to enough clinical opportunities to expand how many students they can take,” Brunell said.

To help, the state Board of Nursing has authorized school to provide one-quarter of that training on patient simulators -- high-tech mannequins that use engineering and software to mimic hundreds of medical problems. In this region, Sarasota Memorial Hospital already uses adult and infant simulators to train its staff.

The state legislature has set aside money for buying the simulators, Brunell said, but colleges often can’t afford the salary of a technical expert to run the machine and the ongoing maintenance costs.

“We believe we have equipment that is almost literally in the closet, because the educational programs do not have the personnel with the technical experience and the funding to upgrade and maintain the programs,” she said.

Her group will assess where and how the technology is being used, how to get it into more schools and and create partnerships to expand training. One possibility: having colleges combine funding to pay for technical support and trainers.

It’s one of many efforts backed by the Blue Foundation. Its Generation RN program has funded 200 full scholarships for nursing students and endowed three professor positions.

The grant and matching funds are a new way to tackle the problem. “We’re hoping that technology like this will enhance the ability of many schools to accept more students and reduce the shortage of nurses in the state,” said Randy Kammer, president of the Blue Foundation board of directors.