BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — There is a bill on the table in Albany designed to ease the nursing shortage here at home. Local lawmakers want to partner with Western New York hospitals, universities and nursing unions to get students through their training programs and into the workforce more quickly.
The nursing shortage is a well-documented problem in our region and across the country. Our hospitals are routinely hosting on the spot hiring events to get more nurses into their facilities, but a nationwide nursing group reports school enrollment is not growing fast enough to meet demand. The AACN predicts there will not be enough nurses joining the workforce over the next decade to fill the job openings.
Healthcare professionals, universities, nursing schools, hospital representatives and assembly members gathered at Trocaire Thursday to talk about a potential solution. It involves simulated training for nursing students.
"What we know is that there's a plethora of students who want to get admitted into nursing schools, but nursing schools have to turn them away because the number of nurses is limited by number of clinical placements, they need to get in order to graduate," Assembly Member Monica Wallace explains.
Wallace is proposing legislation that would allow nursing schools to use technology and substitute some of the required clinical learning with simulated training. She says, "this gives them opportunity to do it, make their mistakes in a controlled setting and then go out there and take what they've learned and do it on a real patient, in a real environment."
Bassam Deeb, The President of Trocaire College says they are ready to implement simulated training and he believes it would help solve the critical nursing shortage.
"We are obligated by New York State Office of professions to have those clinical experiences. If we don't have access to those clinical experiences obviously then we can only accept so many students," he explains. Deeb says simulated clinical training would allow them to enroll more nursing students.
