With the H.R. 2043: Nurse Education, Expansion,and Development Act of 2009, the government plans to give out grants to fund schools to allow them to hire more faculty and equipment. The money will be given on a per student basis, and the type of program the student is enrolled in will also be taken into consideration. Many requirements must be followed such as: accredidation, NCLEX passing rates and amount of time each student spends through a program. In response, the nursing schools must show the government that they are spending the money wisely and they need to show improvement based on at least two criteria listed in the bill.
The need for the change in this policy is very clear. In the school year of 2008-2009 there were 62.8 percent of schools of nursing that had 1 to 16 vacant faculty positions, and there were also 17.8 percent of the schools needing additional faculty, but did not have the resources needed in order to add more positions. Because of this, there were almost 50,000 undergraduate students who qualified to be in a nursing program who were not granted a position because there were not enough faculty to teach them. The impact of gaining more trained faculty would allow these programs to admit more students and therefore produce more working nurses. This is important because there is a projected shortage of nurses and faculty in the next 10 years based on retirement rates, which are currently increasing as the baby boomer generation gets older. With these changes, our nation can be confident that the nursing profession will continue to increase in both graduating undergrad nurses as well as masters or doctorate prepared nurses that are able to teach.
Information on this bill can be found at:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-2043
The Nurse Education, Expansion, and Development Act of 2009 is a very important bill to be passed. As this post said, the baby boomer generation will soon be retiring to add to the nursing shortage. This shortage also applies to the nurses needed to teach in nursing programs. This bill will be able to afford to hire more faculty to teach our future nurses because in order to fix the shortage we need to educate and train new ones. This will expand nursing programs to allow more perspective students to be enrolled because a lack of faculty is one of the main issues concerning enrollment. Nursing programs either 1) do not have enough faculty, 2) do not have the equipment/resources, 3) do not have the contracts needed with local healthcare facilities for clinical experiences, or 4) any combination of these to sufficiently accept applicants. This bill will give funding to nursing programs to address all of these issues. This is very important because the U.S. is not currently able to produce new RN’s to overcome the present shortage let alone the shortage 10 years from now.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the support, this is an important bill that will affect all of our future careers in nursing care.
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