Although the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the nursing profession will expand by 6 percent by 2031, the nation currently faces a shortage.
Kelly Simmons, DNP, RN, a nursing strategist at Assessment Technologies Institute's Nursing Education section, which helps students prepare for nursing examinations, recently detailed key ways to improve nursing education in a Feb. 2 opinion piece published by the Courier Journal.
Three of her insights were:
- Increasing nurse faculty compensation: "Compensation for faculty is relatively lower than what nurses can earn in the clinical arena — or in other career fields all together," Dr. Simmons wrote. "This is especially for nurses with advanced degrees, who can earn as much as 50 percent higher pay in the clinical or private sector."
- Recognize how hard the work is: "We work long hours for low wages to ensure the quality of nursing care is not compromised," she wrote. "When the pandemic closed our doors to face-to-face education, we pledged to continue to educate and graduate our students in a nontraditional manner so they were ready to jump into the crisis."
- Incentivize nurses to become faculty: "In time of severe shortage, government must invest in nursing education through grants and supplemental funding for both private and public institutions," Dr. Simmons wrote. "We must expand program capacity, while maintaining quality education, to educate sufficient numbers of students to fill the nursing shortage gap now and in the future."
Read the full piece here.