Schools in Need of More than a Dozen Nurses

Qualified RNs sought to work with students on health management, prevention and education. The rickety economy has had an impact on school health clinics, which are losing full-time nurses to hospitals and doctors’ offices offering more hours.

As a result, APS is in need of more than a dozen school nurses.

Laura Case, the district’s new director of nursing services, said the job is ideal for parents of school-age children because school nurses work when students are in school. Full-time school nurses work six-and-a-half-hour days, 183 days a year, with summers and holidays off.

While those are attractive hours, they have proved to be a detriment in attracting nurses in this weak economy because many qualified individuals need more hours and more money to make ends meet. School nurses get paid a competitive hourly rate of between $25 and $41 an hour, but they work fewer hours than those in hospitals or doctors’ offices.

If nurses can make the hours work for them, there are other advantages to working in schools, Case said.

“It’s such a positive environment in which nurses can really support student health and wellness,” she said. “School nurses are educators with a focus on prevention.”

Nurses also play an important role in the management of care for students with health issues such as diabetes, asthma and allergies.

“School nurses don’t just take temperatures and put Band-Aids on skinned knees,” Case said. “Many children rely on the school nurse to help manage health plans that allow them to focus on learning.”

Despite the shortage of school nurses, schools haven’t been without health care providers this school year, Case said. The district has used agency nurses to help fill the void. However, Case said it would be nice to have more stability in school health offices.

APS is now taking applications for school nurses. Go to the job listings on the APS website for a more detailed job description and to fill out an application.

Qualifications for school nurses include:

• A BSN or bachelor’s degree in a related health field
• Current new Mexico RN license
• Three years of full-time experience in a supervised clinical nursing setting
• Current CPR certification

Preferred areas of experience include:

• School nursing
• Pediatric, hospital or ambulatory care
• Technology dependent care/pediatric ICU
• Emergency room.

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Nursing grads struggle to find jobs, despite projected shortages

Nursing is the largest healthcare occupation, adding more than a quarter million jobs last year alone, according to government figures. So why couldn’t Candice Dyer find a nursing job?

Dyer, a June 2011 graduate of Chamberlain College of Nursing in Chicago, and several of her classmates spent upwards of five months searching for their first jobs.

“I graduated back in June and took my boards back in August,” Dyer said. “From then until October, I filled out over a hundred online applications.”

Dyer, 30, continued working as a massage therapist while filing dozens of applications each week.

“I didn’t get any calls back,” she said. And next-day emails? Those were only sent to inform her that the institutions were not hiring new grads.

The job search was draining, but Dyer continued to network and her persistence paid off in October.

“I got my first interview, and my only interview, because the person I gave a massage to used to work in H.R. at the hospital,” she said.

Dyer said she considered herself lucky that the interview led to a job in her first choice of specialties as an emergency room nurse at West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park.

“I was hoping to get any job and any experience,” said Dyer. “That was all I could hope for.”

The sour economy has upended projections for a U.S. nursing shortage. Baby-boomer nurses who had been expected to start retiring in large numbers are clinging to their jobs, so new grads can’t get in the door.

“They’re kind of clogging some of those vacancies right when a lot of those new R.N.s are entering the workforce,” said David Auerbach, a health economist at RAND Health, nonprofit health research arm of the RAND Corp.

Meanwhile he says, the trends show that new nursing grads in their mid-20s are the largest cohort to enter the field in several decades.

“This is an indicator of a new generation of people that is very energetic about nursing,” Auerbach said.

The log-jam is primarily confined to metropolitan areas.

Students like Dyer are fortunate to find jobs in hospital settings within the city, said Dr. Ann Solari-Twadell, director of the accelerated bachelor of science in nursing program at Loyola University. Chicago and other big cities are home to elite hospitals, the places new nursing grads aspire to. These hospitals often offer one-on-one mentors, higher pay and other perks that new nurses won’t find elsewhere.

While there is a demand for nurses in many rural and suburban settings, the jobs are often outside hospital settings, making it harder to develop expertise in a specialty.

“They’re not too excited about going to places where that professional development isn’t exactly on the front burner,” Solari-Twadell said.

The nature of nursing is changing, shifting away from hospital-based primacy. Nursing programs are evolving to meet the need and to give students a realistic view of their profession’s future.

“We know that in the future we really are going to shift care to care in the home, care in the community, care in the clinics,” said Mary Chesney, director of the doctorate nursing practice program at the University of Minnesota said. “We’re trying to prepare students for that.”

Positions like Dyer’s, she said, will become fewer as the need moves to a new identity of healthcare with an aging population.

“We are trying to help our new graduates envision a world that looks different in the world where care is delivered today,” she said.

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Accelerated nursing degree offered in Aberdeen

South Dakota State University College of Nursing is hosting an open house Saturday, Jan. 28, to introduce the accelerated bachelor's degree in nursing program it will offer in Aberdeen. Coursework will begin January 2013 on the Northern State University campus.

Overviews of the accelerated nursing program will be presented at 2, 3 and 4 p.m. Jan. 28 in the gallery of the Alonzo Ward Hotel, 104 S. Main, Aberdeen.

The program gives those holding a bachelor's degree in a field outside of nursing the opportunity to earn a bachelor's degree in nursing in just 12 months.

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