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05/15/2024 08:30 AMThere are currently 4.3 million registered nurses who work in every aspect of health as crucial people in a highly complex and diverse healthcare systems both locally and nationally, according to the American Nurses Association.
However, Connecticut sits on the lower end of that overall figure, as the Connecticut Center for Nursing Workforce, Inc. estimates that only 50% of registered nurses are working in that profession, resulting in a shortage of the vocation across the state. One person who is looking to lead the state, and the country, in the growth and diversification of the profession is Larry Slater, the Dean of Quinnpiac’s School of Nursing.
Larry identifies one of the reasons for the shortage of Connecticut nurses in 2024 being fatigue felt during their work in the coronavirus pandemic and the “toll it took on their mental health.”
“We also had, prior to COVID, across the country and in Connecticut, the median age of nurses was in the 50s. And so they had been working for decades and we’re getting close to retirement,” adds Larry.
In order to build a robust nursing workforce in the state, Larry is looking to develop within his department a new “competency - based education” curriculum “that looks at building durable transferable skills so that [with] our graduates, we’re not so focused on preparing them to work in a hospital,” he says.
This would help to diversify the range of options available for the more than 10,000 applications Quinnipiac’s nursing programs its North Haven and Hamden campuses receive annually, accommodating more nursing hopefuls.
“If we truly built a competency-based education model where we’re building skills that are transferable across settings, we will be using our clinics, our community health programs, our long-term care facilities, more our ambulatory care and urgent care centers,” Larry says. “We would be using all of these health care spaces throughout the state of Connecticut, which would increase our clinical footprint to get these hours our students need to be able for us to put more into the system.”
Larry says Quinnipiac is also looking to expand its nursing workforce by enrolling “second degree” students into their programs. Targeted students may include people who have already graduated with a higher education degree but are interested in health care as a different line of work. These students would be involved in partnerships with major organizations like Hartford Healthcare, which would offer employment opportunities such as being a certified nursing assistant or patient care associate “while they’re doing a part-time nursing program with us through Quinnipiac to get that second baccalaureate degree over a two-year period” as opposed to a rigorous 12-month intensive, says Larry.
Aside from opening up new educational opportunities, Larry also sees an objective through his department in creating safe, empowering, and healthy work environments for nurses. While this may be an important objective for any job field, nursing is to be no exception, says Larry.
Even before the impact of COVID-19, nurses faced issues of being overworked with an overload of patient care, impacting their own health and wellness.
“When you add COVID on top of that, that’s why these nurses were getting burnt out,” Larry says. “We realized that hospitals, health care systems, the employers, as well as the education side, weren’t working with our nurses and our student nurses on their own personal health and wellness, addressing work-life balance issues, and making sure they were taking care of.”
Larry says, “If we don’t take care of our nurses, they’re not going to be able to take care of our patients to the best of their ability, and that’s going to impact patient outcomes down the road.”
He says Quinnipiac is trying to help nursing students on the policy advocate side of their profession, and how to communicate with lawmakers in Hartford and Washington D.C. on how to make hospitals safer environments with greater amounts of workers to care for an aging population. There are also issues of violence and assault against healthcare workers Larry says that need to be addressed.
From revamping its academic curriculum, proving greater capacity, and advocating changes in public policy, Larry hopes to see his department be a leader in education and experience in an ever-changing world of healthcare.
“We’re going to try to flip our model over the next year as we’re redesigning our curriculum, to be more focused on experiential learning and building these durable and transferable skills, and not so much on the high stakes environment which nursing academia has become,” he says. “We think we can be a leader in that across the country and demonstrate that we don’t have to be so high stakes and test heavy to put out nurses that we know we’re going to be tremendous clinicians when they graduate.”