UWM College of Nursing Leads Effort to Increase Nursing Faculty

UWM's College of Nursing has initiated a partnership with other Wisconsin public and private partners to craft an innovative response to relieve a “bottleneck” in filling the growing need for nurses.

In June, the University of Wisconsin System received a $1.3 million grant from the Department of Labor to help address the shortage by increasing the number of nursing faculty. A shortage of faculty has slowed efforts to educate enough nurses to help fill increased needs, fueled by aging baby boomers. Currently, more than 3,000 potential nursing students are on waiting lists for Wisconsin nursing programs, and nationally nursing schools turned away more than 29,000 qualified students.

Sally Lundeen, dean of the UWM College of Nursing, is project director on the grant, called the “State of Wisconsin Initiative to Fast-Track (SWIFT) Nurse Educators.” “The SWIFT proposal will reduce the greatest barrier to producing a sufficient and diverse nursing workforce by increasing the number of nursing faculty available to teach future nurses,” said Lundeen at the time the grant was announced.

The SWIFT program is expected to ensure that 70 new nurse educators with master's degrees are available by 2007 and 50 more have entered the pipeline for a graduate degree, making it possible to educate 800 more students in the state each year. The first students will enter the program in the spring of 2006.

UWM and the UW System will work collaboratively with the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS), Wisconsin Workforce Development Boards, Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, Alverno College and private health care sector associations, providers, business and labor organizations on the SWIFT program.

Organizations in the private sector are expected to provide additional funds, according to Lundeen, resulting in a total of $4 million invested in the project.

“Thanks to a significant investment from the federal government and private-sector employees, this is a win-win strategy that will boost Wisconsin's healthcare workforce capacity,” said Lundeen. The project also will serve as a model for other states, she added.

Using the education foundation in place at UW System campuses and Wisconsin technical colleges, Lundeen says the program will target several potential sources of nursing faculty, and develop streamlined coursework to allow them to earn their nursing master's degree more quickly.

Potential teaching resources include people who already have a bachelor's degree in a field other than nursing who want to switch careers; and people with an associate's degree in nursing who want to get their master's degree. The SWIFT grant and partnership with the private sector also will provide scholarships and schedule flexibility for working nurses with associate's and bachelor's degrees who want to move forward with a master's degree. The goal is to allow these students to earn a master's degree in two or three years, rather than four or five years.

In addition, the program will develop options that will make it financially feasible to let working nurses combine practice and college teaching duties, according to an article in the Journal Sentinel.

Although faculty shortages are not the only challenge in educating more nurses, this grant “would make a significant impact on what I call the nurse educator bottleneck,” Lundeen told the newspaper. UWM's nursing program has been turning away 500 to 600 qualified students each year, and closed admissions early for the 2005-2006 academic year.

A key focus of the SWIFT program will be to encourage more diversity in nursing, Lundeen adds, with 20 percent of those involved expected to be students of color.
The UW System grant proposal, developed collaboratively by Wisconsin nurses and state workforce officials, was one of only 12 recipients from the 205 applicants for funding under President Bush's High Growth Job Training Initiative.

Emily Stover DeRocco, assistant secretary for employment and training at the U.S. Department of Labor, told the Journal Sentinel that the Wisconsin project was chosen because “they presented some very creative approaches to accelerating their nursing education programs.....it was a very attractive project that we could replicate across the country to accelerate nursing education and begin to address the shortage of nurses.”