It is a sign of the economic times: Nursing students at Howard University work part-time jobs and still can’t maintain up with tuition. “We have experienced good students having to withdraw from the program because of lack of resources. When parents lose jobs, students can’t continue,” said Mary Hill, associate dean within the school’s division of nursing.
In the start of the month, the game changed. Howard received $1.5 million in the Obama administration to train student nurses and others in sciences for example radiology and occupational therapy. The award was a fraction of $96 million in grants doled out by the Department of Health and Human Services on July 1 to hundreds of health-profession programs at colleges and universities nationwide.
The money is especially intended to improve the racial diversity from the health-care workforce by keeping minority students in health classes, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. Reports have estimated how the average nursing student leaves college with almost $50,000 in loan debt.
“The health professions workforce in the United States does not reflect the populace it serves,” Sebelius mentioned. “These funds will help support the education of disadvantaged students that are more likely to go on to serve in underserved places.”
A 2008 report by the Council on Physician and Nurse Supply said schools would need to create 30,000 nurses annually to offset a shortage too as a looming mass retirement of nurses, 45 % of whom are 50 or older. A 2007 report by the American Hospital Association said 116,000 nurses were required to fill registered-nurse vacancies in hospitals.
Minority representation within the health professions has grown at a snail’s pace since 1980. Among registered nurses, for example, the percentage of African Americans and Hispanics falls far brief of their percentage from the populace, according to the 2008 National Sample of Registered Nurses.
African Americans represent 5 percent of registered nurses and 12 percent of the population. Hispanics represent about 4 percent of registered nurses and 15 percent from the population. Asian Americans fall brief, too, with 3 percent of registered nurses and nearly 6 percent of the population. The sample mentioned that the 83 percent of nurses that are white far exceeds their population representation — 66 percent.
The grants are required “because health care does not have large numbers of underrepresented students,” Hill said. That’s an issue because members of minorities have said in surveys that they are more comfy with health professionals who are familiar with their culture, and the more comfortable they’re, the more they return for treatment prior to their conditions worsen.
“There are too few white nurses who understand these cultures,” mentioned Betty Smith Williams, president emeritus of the National Coalition of Ethnic Minority Nurse Associations. Williams said she was the first black nurse to teach at a main California university, and subsequently became an assistant dean of nursing in the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“Traditional universities do not have the role models and also the sensitivities to recruit and train minority students. They always come to us, and we need to assist fill the void,” Williams mentioned. “We recruit through networking, camaraderie and relationships developed at our conventions.”
Howard and two other historically black schools, the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta and the Meharry Medical College in Nashville, were recently cited in a study as the universities that create the biggest percentage of primary-care physicians who practice in areas where health workers are scarce.
Howard has 1,100 students enrolled within the College of Pharmacology, Nursing and Allied Health Sciences, and maintaining them there during the economic slump is an uncertainty. When Hill learned that HHS was offering grants, she grabbed an application and submitted it on the June 1 deadline. “This may be the largest grant for scholarships that the college has received,” she mentioned.
Still, mentioned Norma Martinez Rogers, president from the National Association of Hispanic Nurses, it isn’t enough. “Ninety-six million sounds like a lot, but in reality it’s not a great deal,” she said. “I think it’s a step within the correct direction. But I believe we need more mentors, more programs, more funding.
“There’s such a shortage of Hispanic nurses that they’re bringing Filipino nurses to places like South Texas. But Filipinos do not know our culture. . . . We must encourage our peoples to go to college and turn out to be nurses.”