JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – The nursing shortage in Mississippi is not only affecting healthcare, it’s also causing challenges in education.
“I’ve always wanted to be a nurse. I love taking care of people. It was the obvious choice for me,” said Rebecca Harper.
Harper is a stay-at-home mother who chose to head back to school to become a nurse. She’ll finish the two-year registered nurse program in May at Holmes Community College.
Alice Austin is in charge of the nursing programs at the Ridgeland and Grenada campuses. She said Mississippi is short thousands of nurses.
“Everybody who wants a job has a job,” said Austin.
Holmes Community College leaders said at least 70 students graduate from the nursing program each year. However, one gap that needs to be filled is the educators who prepare nursing students for a future in healthcare.
“The problem we’re having is finding nursing educators who want to teach because of the nursing shortage. Nurses are traveling and making more money, but nursing education salaries have not risen to what they can make as a traveling nurse,” said Austin.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reported that there aren’t many nursing faculty members. Recent numbers show only a 7.2% in 2020, compared to 6.5% in 2019.
The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) College of Nursing and Health has teamed up with Merit Health Wesley in Hattiesburg, adding two hospital clinical teaching faculty members.
“We’ve provided them with what we call ’embedded instructors.” These are instructors that we actually employ. It’s much harder for the universities to get positions than it is for the facilities here. We have the ability to now take in 32 more nursing students by having faculty within our hospital. This allows us to have more nurses that are graduating come through USM. We started out this last semester, so we have a group here now that is senior level and a group at sophomore level,” said Chief Nursing Officer Phebe McKay.
The goal with the instructors is two-fold: to reduce the nursing shortage by increasing the number of USM nursing graduates who start working in a Mississippi healthcare setting and to help the university increase clinical faculty so enrollment will grow.