A lack of clinical space, not students or faculty, prevents Marion Technical College from expanding its highly rated nursing program, which has a year-and-a-half waiting list of prospective pupils.

A class of 64 students Saturday graduated at MTC and will receive associate’s degrees in nursing as they prepare to take the NCLEX-RN state board licensure exam, said Carol Hoffman, MTC director of nursing.

She said the college had the number one passage rate for the state board of nursing exam among associate and bachelor degree programs and fourth-highest rate among all schools in Ohio. Marion Technical College graduates’ passage rate ranks fourth overall for the last 11 years, Hoffman said.

“I attribute it to faculty doing a good job, students having a desire to learn and working hard,” she said. “Our faculty, most of them also work at least part time … so they’re out there in the field. They’re current. Always we heard our tests are harder than the state board exams, so we train them for the state boards.”

Nationwide, however, the number of nurses being produced by schools has not kept up with the need, Hoffman said. MTC has 77 students in its first-year class “and will add a few more in the summer” before it reaches capacity. The college has begun a waiting list for 2009.

She said the college would like to increase the number of students the program could accept, but said a lack of physical facilities where pupils can gain the clinical experience the college requires are not available.

Another threat to the nation’s ability to eliminate the nursing shortage is a lack of qualified faculty to teach the students, she said. The Ohio Board of Nursing requires at least master’s degree in nursing or variations of bachelor’s and master’s degrees to teach.

While other parts of the state struggle with that challenge, the Marion area does not, Hoffman said, observing, “I can find faculty. I can’t find clinical sites.”

MTC has created a Sunday night/Monday morning clinical at Grady Memorial Hospital in Delaware to address the issue.

“We’re doing evenings. We’ll be doing weekends next year … just to have a place to have patients and beds to take care of,” Hoffman said. “Patients don’t stay very long. They used to stay, but they don’t anymore so finding patients is difficult.”

Some nursing programs have expanded at the expense of their effectiveness, which Hoffman said Marion Technical College will not do.

“Some schools have just doubled the capacity of their school,” she said. “You decrease your quality if you increase your quantity.”

MTC is adding 10 spaces to its program this year, and Hoffman has asked for another grant from the Ohio Board of Nursing to add three faculty members, one full-time and two part-time. Cost of the additional staff would be approximately $200,000 over two years, she said.

“It’s expensive to teach nurses because our ratio has to be 1 (teacher) to 10 (students) for clinical,” she said, referring to another Ohio Board of Nursing requirement.

She said MTC nursing classes usually have a 1-to-5 or 1-to-6 teacher-student ratio because of the high acuity of patients.

“An instructor could not take care of more students or patients than that,” she said.

The college nursing program, which takes seven quarters to complete, requires first-year students to spend 10 hours a week in clinical work and second-year pupils to work 14 hours a week at clinical sites.

Nursing careers continue to offer many benefits, including a variety of job types and many areas in need of nurses, she said.

Information from: www.bucyrustelegraphforum.com

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