Taman Siswa

Highlighting a statewide nursing shortage that some say decreases the quality of care at hospitals and other facilities, Villa Julie College could receive up to $750,000 for upgrading its distance learning program for nurses.

Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski said last week the funds were included in a Senate spending bill, along with $2.5 million for the Maryland Association of Community Colleges to expand nursing programs, higher more faculty and upgrade equipment for nursing labs.

“The latest vacancy rate is 10.7 percent,” Maryland Hospital Association spokeswoman Nancy M. Fiedler said. “There are about 2,000 positions that need to be filled.”

Although the nursing shortage is slightly less dire than when the vacancy rate at Maryland hospitals peaked about five years ago at 14-15 percent, Fiedler said the coming wave of baby boomer retirements could make a bad situation worse.

Within the decade Fiedler said there could be a need for up to 10,000 nurses.

A confluence of circumstances - including retiring boomers, an aging population requiring more care, Maryland’s population growth and a dearth of nurses entering the field - is serving to continue and exacerbate the shortage.

“If anything, it’s not getting better,” Fiedler said. “It’s an extraordinary set of circumstances.”

In 2000, the Statewide Commission on the Crisis in Nursing under the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene was charged with looking at how to better train, recruit and retain nurses. The commission ended in 2005, but the Nursing Workforce Commission, under the Maryland Board of Nursing, took up its work.

“With all the attention, the vacancies have gone down,” Fiedler said. “A lot of the focus now is on growing your own nurses.”

Growing your own, Fiedler said, means improving the numbers of people choosing nursing careers, helping those already in nursing fields move up the ladder, and keeping experienced nurses in the field.

“You have every level of people who want to go up the career ladder - we want to provide them with that,” Fiedler said.

At Villa Julie College, the Nursing Distance Learning program allows nurses who want to continue their education, but may not have a program nearby, to do so via interactive video classes transmitted from a lab at the school’s Stevenson campus.

Started in 2003, the program uses cameras, monitors and transmitters to send nursing classes to seven community colleges where nurses can earn nursing bachelor’s degrees where programs are otherwise not available.

Villa Julie’s nursing division started in 1991.

Community colleges partnered with Villa Julie for the nursing distance-learning program are Anne Arundel, Carroll, Harford, Howard, Prince George’s, Chesapeake College and the College of Southern Maryland.

“The main class is taught at Villa Julie College and transmitted via interactive video,” Judith A. Feustle, a registered nurse and director of Villa Julie’s nursing division, said. “It appeals to students that are already RNs.”

Classes are transmitted four times a week. The system can transmit to four sites at the same time.

Citing a study published in January by the Journal of Advanced Nursing, Feustle said that mortality rates for acute patients are lower in hospitals that have a higher percentage of registered nurses and a higher percentage of nurses with bachelor’s degrees.

The study concluded that just as hospitals focus on accurate diagnoses and treatments, they should also focus on the proportion of registered nurses and bachelor-degreed nurses on their staffs.

Therefore, it follows that the nursing shortage is affecting the quality of health care across the state, where Feustle said hospitals and other facilities are forced to hire unlicensed health care workers to swell staffs lacking the necessary compliment of registered nurses.

“The nursing shortage continues to get worse and it’s not just in hospitals,” Feustle said. “It’s in nursing homes, home health, it’s across the board. A hospital might not be able to have as many beds open in a unit, or not be able to have as many operating rooms open.”

Feustle said some answers to the problem lie in expanding college nursing programs, increasing nursing faculties and adding more clinical programs at hospitals, where nurses learn their trade in life-and-death settings.

With the $750,000 proposed by Mikulski, Villa Julie could see significant funds for improving the distance learning program and reaching more nursing students.

Feustle said the technology for transmitting has changed drastically since the program was launched four years ago and needs to be upgraded.

“We’re looking at the technology to be Internet-based,” she said.

The spending bill that includes the funds for community colleges and Villa Julie College passed the Senate Appropriations Committee last week, but must still pass a full Senate vote.

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