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WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 (UPI) -- Frontline nurses faced understaffing, burnout and underappreciation, driving thousands to quit their jobs during the pandemic, several experts told members of Congress on Thursday. In fact, a McKinsey Global Institute report in May found that by 2025, the United States could be short up to 450,000 nurses.
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But several leaders from academic medical program leaders told the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions that government support can help increase the number of nursing school educators and improve access to nurses in rural communities.
"Our country is perilously short of nurses, and those we do have are often not working in the settings that provide the most value," Sarah Szanton, dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, told the committee.
"Nurses are often considered the oxygen of any healthcare setting, so as a country, we need people to become new nurses and we need to retain current nurses."
Szanton said the average age for nurses across the country is 54. About 19% of all working nurses are 65 or older. She said aging members of profession become more concerning as the overall population also ages and starts to develop more chronic conditions.
The nursing shortage includes a nursing faculty shortage. Szanton said the nation needs about 2,100 more educators, adding that they should be paid equal to their clinical counterparts to help retain them.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said that in 2021, almost 92,000 applicants for baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs were turned away primarily because of faculty shortages. The University of Maine had 1,239 applications for 80 slots in its nursing program this year, she noted.
"I think there's this misperception that people don't want to become nurses, when in fact, we have a ton of applicants from people who do want to enter the field of nursing but we don't have the professors to teach them," Collins said.
James Herbert, the president of the University of New England in Maine, said his university has increased the number of nurses it has trained by 300% in the past 10 years. He said his institution is working in conjunction with Maine Health to use the nurses on site as training for their students.
He said his university provides professional development and support to help the nurses teach, thereby improving the nurses' skills and enriching students.
Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., said retention is a major challenges that relates to the national nursing shortage. While training is "essential," she said she wanted to know what would motivate students to serve rural areas.
Herbert said colleges need to attract students from rural areas who are more likely to go back to their hometowns or other rural communities and work.
During training, he said, placing students in rural clinical sites has helped, and many enjoyed the work. But, he said, a key factor would be creating scholarships or loan repayment programs for rural areas, and he said Congress could help with that.
"There needs to be an incentive because if you are looking at a big debt that you need to pay off and there's a major hospital in Boston that will give you X additional salary, even if we don't make up the entire amount, we have to incentivize to work in the rural areas," Herbert said.
Sen. Robert Marshall, R-Kan., said he came back to practice medicine in a rural community because he received a scholarship. He said a nursing shortage has existed in rural America for at least 20 years, and that he's faced challenges trying to recruit in the area.
He proposed community college programs as an additional solution to the problem in rural communities.
"Those folks are typically from a small town. They're going to go to that small town community college [and] they're more likely to stay in that small town," Marshall said.
"As we think about going forward, I hope we can come back and talk to the community college's nursing programs a little more about what we can do to accentuate them."
