The United States will need 5.6 million new healthcare workers by 2020. The study, by researchers at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and Workforce, also found that 4.6 million of those new workers will need education beyond high school.

“In healthcare, there are really two labor markets — professional and support,” Anthony P. Carnevale, the report’s lead author and director of the Center on Education and Workforce, said in a news release. “Professional jobs demand postsecondary training and advanced degrees, while support jobs demand high school and some college.” There is “minimal mobility” between the two, Carnevale said, “and the pay gap is enormous — the average professional worker makes 2.5 times as much as the average support worker.”

Among the study’s findings:

• In 2008, 80% of entry-level RNs had at least an associate’s degree, up from 37% in 1980.

• Rising degree requirements in nursing may be crowding out disadvantaged minorities, according to the authors: 51% of white nurses under age 40 have bachelor’s degrees, compared with 46% of Hispanic nurses and 44% of African-American nurses.

• Healthcare has the largest number and proportion of foreign-born and foreign-trained workers of any industry in the U.S. Among healthcare workers, 22% are foreign-born, compared with 13% of all workers nationwide. Most foreign-born nurses come from the Philippines, India and China.

• Only 20% of healthcare professional and technical occupations earn less than $38,000 a year, and almost 50% earn more than $60,000.

• More than 70% of healthcare support workers make less than $30,000 per year, but that percentage is still better than most available alternatives for workers of that skill and education level, according to the report.

• Healthcare successfully competes for science and engineering talent. Because the healthcare, science and technology fields tend to require similar skills, healthcare programs at the associate and bachelor’s level often are appealing alternatives for science and engineering students.

• One difference between the fields: People in healthcare jobs tend to value forming social bonds, while people who gravitate to science, technology and engineering occupations place a greater emphasis on achievement and independence, the researchers found.

Source.

Alisa Glaister, RN, credits her opportunity to ascend from new grad to nurse manager to a few key colleagues, including a director from a different unit who advised her as she led a project to treat angioplasty patients on the telemetry floor. “He helped me get my foot in the door for this project, which I believe has led to my current management position,” said Glaister, a nurse manager at St. Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco.

Glaister met with her mentor weekly to discuss techniques of effective leadership. “He was a tremendous help and guide,” she said.

Mentoring has gained considerable respect as an essential element for training new nurses, whether they’re fresh out of school or recently transferred from another unit. “The first year [out of school] you have those vulnerable moments all the time, and you forget what you have accomplished,” said Hazel Curtis, RN, BSN, MPH, an education specialist for staff development at Loma Linda (Calif.) University Medical Center. “A great mentor picks you up, dusts you off, gives you a pat on the back and says, ‘You can do it.’”

Going one on one
Formal mentoring programs hatched in professional associations and hospitals are popping up around the country as researchers and managers find the practice boosts a nurse’s job satisfaction and confidence.

Cecelia Gatson Grindel, RN, PhD, CMSRN, FAAN, studied the outcomes of Nurses Nurturing Nurses (N3), a mentoring program designed by the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses. The year-long program was rolled out to 40 medical institutions across the country in 2002. Grindel, a professor and interim dean at Georgia State University in Atlanta, said data she could gather indicated more than 90% of mentored nurses stayed on the job, compared to attrition rates as high as 30%. Feedback collected throughout the pilot year of the program suggested mentored nurses had more job satisfaction and confidence.

Yvonne Brookes, RN, director of clinical learning at Baptist Health South Florida in Miami, found similar results after implementing a residency program that included a mentorship component. Previously, turnover among the system’s 4,000 nurses averaged 22%, often because new graduates left the profession or pursued an advanced degree after their first year. Since implementing the program in 2007, the new graduate turnover rate dropped to 6%, she said.

“We realized it wasn’t about the science, it was all that other stuff that goes to the head of a new grad,” she said.

“Other stuff” can range from implementing unit procedure to dealing with difficult managers or unhelpful preceptors. It can be conflict with patients or their families dealing with the shock of witnessing a death for the first time. “Sometimes you just need to vent,” Brookes said.

A mentor also can help a nurse recover from making a medical error — a potentially traumatic experience — by offering emotional support and emphasizing that one mistake doesn’t make a bad nurse.

More.

Virginia Highlands Community College (VHCC) will be the home of a new state-of-the-art nursing simulation laboratory equipped with Education Management Solutions’ (EMS)simulation management technology. The new laboratory will be located in the Nursing Education Building, a facility used by the three colleges in the Virginia Appalachian Tricollege Nursing Program (VATNP), VHCC, Mountain Empire Community College, and Southwest Virginia Community College. 

The EMS technology will assist students to learn from simulation experiences since they will be able review their performance of recorded events and receive faculty feedback during debriefing. In addition, faculty will be able to evaluate students’ competencies using electronic checklists. VATNP students currently complete clinical training in hospitals throughout the region. The simulation lab will enhance this training by allowing students to simultaneously care for multiple "computerized" patients who require different levels of care. Each session in the lab will be videotaped using EMS technology and reviewed by the student and nursing instructor to ensure students are learning from the lab experience. 

Alongside the estimated 480 VATNP students, the area’s healthcare workers in continuing education programs and other nursing programs will also benefit from using the lab. VATNP enrollment has steadily increased, with 150 to 200 new students each year. EMS technology will help VHCC accommodate this growing number of learners by streamlining the management of the simulation laboratory with software to record events, automate the scheduling of rooms and participants, evaluate,  score, generate longitudinal reports, and track lab inventory.