Nursing Assistant Resources On The Web

Instead of talking about the shortage of nurses and aides, this hospital decided to do something about it.

University Health System, a public hospital in San Antonio, faced a critical shortage of nurses in 2001, with the vacancy rate climbing to 21 percent. Without new nurses, the hospital might be forced to curtail or shut down some key emergency functions.

Contract nursing providers could fill the gap quickly. But the hospital decided to gamble on a training and development program, hoping to create a long-term pipeline of new nurses, some of whom would be culled from the hospital’s own unskilled worker ranks. The strategy included nursing school scholarships and training assistance, and it worked so well that the hospital’s nursing vacancy rate is down to 4.59 percent today.

The nuts and bolts:

…the hospital began looking closer at its 5,400-member workforce. While the hospital has about 950 nurses, it also has hundreds of unskilled workers serving in housekeeping, maintenance and cafeteria jobs. The hospital determined that many of those workers would welcome the chance to move up to more skilled and higher paying jobs but lacked the time or resources to do so.

So the hospital launched a certified nursing assistant program under which a local community college offered courses on site toward a medical technician certificate, which is often a first step to becoming a nurse. The program has been a hit with the hospital’s lower-skilled workers.

To encourage continued education toward a full nursing degree or certificate, the hospital partnered with local nursing schools to fund a $3,000-per-year nursing scholarship program open not only to hospital workers but to other students as well. The catch: graduates must agree to work for University Health for periods ranging from two to three years.

To help make sure the nursing schools had enough faculty, the hospital arranged for professional staff members to teach the courses. The program is funded through a government grant.

Innovative and inspirational. Other hospitals could do similar things.

How’s it worked so far?

The series of initiatives worked so well that the hospital now has a steady stream of new nurses lining up to fill open slots. The scholarship program has proven so successful that it was recently put on temporary hiatus because the hospital has all the nurses it can handle at the moment.

Now that is success.