Coming up on IGI, Kansas hospitals and clinics are facing a shortage of nurses and other health care professionals.

We examine this critical issue affecting our health care system.

Stay with us.

This program is brought to you with support from the Lewis H. Humphreys Charitable Trust and from the Friends of KTWU.

Hello and welcome to IGI.

I'm your host LaTiffany Obozele.

On todays show we're looking at the shortage of nursing and health care professionals in Kansas.

Nurses are the backbone of our health system, and they play an invaluable role in providing compassionate care to patients.

But increase demand for health care services has put a strain on staffing needs in our clinics and hospitals.

Today, we'll examine the root causes of staffing shortage, its impact on our communities, and uncover innovative strategies to attract, train and retain talented health care professionals.

Joining us for discussion on this topic today are Carol Perry, senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Stormont Vail Health Care.

Dr. Libby Rosen, Dean of the Baker University School of Nursing, and Dr Linda Adams-Wendling president of the Kansas State Nurses Association.

Carol ,Libby and Linda, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode.

I want to start and give our viewers an introduction of who you are.

So, Carol, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself.

So thank you.

I'm Carol Perry.

It's a pleasure to be here to talk about nursing.

I've been a nurse for 42 years.

I've been at Stormont for 42 years and I love the profession.

I am the Senior Vice President- Chief Nurse, now.

But there's so much you can do in health care and in nursing.

And so it's a pleasure to talk about where we're at at this point and what we can do to bring more people into the profession of health care, into nursing.

So thanks for this opportunity.

Libby?

Im Dr. Libby Rosen.

I'm happy to be here and represent the educational aspect of nursing and nursing shortage.

I've been a nurse for 49 years, the first 30 of that at the bedside and then this last 19 years, providing education for the upcoming students who are going to be nurses and and end up taking my place at the bedside.

And it is really important that we talk about this shortage.

We find we need to find innovative ways to collaborate with our partners and find ways that we can let people know what an amazing profession nursing is.

And Linda?

Yes, my name is Linda Adams-Wendling.

and I currently serve as the president of the Kansas State Nurses Association.

And I'm very honored and excited to be here today to visit with you about the nursing shortage.

My first 30 to 35 years of nursing was in service and managing all different levels of health care environments, including aeromedical services, which was really one of my favorite areas.

The last 20 some years of my career, I have been a nurse educator and educating nurses, both from the CNA perspective, all the way through LPNs, Associate Degree, Baccalaureate and Master's degree and at the doctoral level and, and including nurse practitioner.

So again, I'm here to really share the voice of nursing and some of the things that are going on at the national level to address nursing shortage.

Thank you guys all for the work that you're doing in this profession.

We keep saying nursing shortage.

And so I'll start with you, Carol.

What are some factors that are contributing to the nursing shortage?

Well, I spend a lot of time with nurses and I think it's multifactorial.

It's not just one thing, but definitely we had a shortage before the pandemic and it has exacerbated since we had that period of time where things were changing quickly and people were so acutely ill and there was so much unknown.

So I think fear the fear of the unknown, there's just the basic foundation is there's just less workforce.

There's fewer people going into the workforce, fewer people going into health care.

Fewer people staying in health care.

There is a lot of people that decided to retire early or get out of health care totally during the pandemic.

People wanting more work life balance.

You know, in a hospital setting, there's a 24 seven responsibility, a lot of call responsibility.

And then you add on top of that a shortage, fewer staff, and it just adds to burnout.

I know that my colleagues here can talk more about, you know, just being kind to people.

But but sometimes there's just a workplace violence issue.

And, you know, that's something that just adds stress on top of very, very sick patients.

During the pandemic, the nurses were everything to the patients.

You can let family members in.

We were trying to control the spread.

And so there is just a lot of stress on top of that.

And like I said, people chose to leave early.

So I think this is our opportunity to really focus on a pipeline and how do we get the the knowledge and and like Libby said, how do we get people knowing what opportunities are out there and a passion to be able to understand why we went into nursing that love, that privilege to care for patients.

What about you, Libby?

What are you seeing from the educational forefront?

Well, one of the challenges was that the preparation of the students during the time of the pandemic ended up waning a bit.

Sometimes online education.

People weren't prepared for how to provide that, and we had to change day by day in terms of what we could do.

Now, some very positive things came out of it.

We became much more adept at being able to provide that education remotely, being able to come up with case studies and ways of getting some clinical experiences.

But I know all of my educational partners across the state we meet regularly talked about the fact that the students coming in are not as well prepared.

Sometimes in the the junior high/high school settings, the requirements changed a little bit.

So students don't know how to write a paper, don't necessarily know all of the math and sciences that are so vitally important in a nursing career.

And we've seen that preparedness change a bit, and that has brought about a challenge that we have to rise to meet.

We have to also realize that the whole mental health state of our nation, with the pandemic of our world, with a pandemic, was impacted.

And so that has made a difference in terms of people saying, yes, is this what I'm going to do or if I'm going to be a nurse, am I mentally ready and able to do it?

So we saw a dip in the number of applications and we have had to do some innovative ways of trying to attract students, help them to see the image of nursing for what it is.

Openly and honestly, nursing is full of opportunities for people.

I work with a graduate student right now who does abstraction.

So she works from home and she goes through the the records of a patient in order to make sure that they've met all the benchmarks they needed to meet in the care of those patients.

So there's a wide variety of exciting things, but the challenge of getting people to realize that and recognize is that that's where we're at in education.

And what are you hearing on the forefront from the voice of nurses?

Absolutely.

You know, one of the primary factors or what I would say driving factors that both on a national level as well as a local level is what Carol brought up as far as retirements.

We have about proximately 4.3 million nurses in in the United States.

However, as Libby has brought up there are so many other areas that we need nurses in.

The average age of nurses right now in the workforce, and this is what's really what I would say, a critical statistic, and that is the age is 46 to 52.

So when we look at the horizon of the nursing shortage, we are projecting anywhere from 200,000, and depending upon the statistics you look at up to a million, how do I say open needs of nurses or a defici as it relates to the nursing shortage?

One in five nurses from now until 2026 will retire.

Again, what Carol has shared as far as workforce violence from a national level as well as here in Kansas, that's a huge issue.

We've had some success here locally with some movement in legislative efforts, but we need to work on that a lot more.

Over 50% of nurses are really saying that when they go to work, one in four will say that they are faced with some type of violence, whether that's verbal or physical.

So, again, that's a huge issue.

Long hours.

When you think about that, that's huge.

So, again, on a national scale, we're looking at safe staffing standards and want to bring that from an advocacy perspective to the local level as well as I think it is really important that consumers understand that this nursing shortage is truly a national crisis.

And although other professions in nursing or I should say other professions in health care excuse me, are very, very important.

The nurse is the one professional at the bedside and facilities that are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

And there is no break.

There is not a holiday.

And so that care must go on.

How does the nursing shortage affect rural areas in Kansas in particular, and are there any unique challenges or solutions for these regions?

Libby how about we start with you.

Okay.

Rural Kansas, obviously, all of Kansas is impacted by this shortage, but particularly in the rural communities, you've got issues of trying to get the transportation to the facilities where they need to have the care.

You have a higher percentage at times of uninsured population than in the urban areas.

All of these things impact health care.

How we provide it and the initiatives that we need to come up with are very important to meet those needs.

Virtual nursing is definitely one of them.

Another thing that we have just started, all of us working on.

K.U.

has kind of taken a lead and many of us are working hard to collaborate with them.

Throughout Kansas is the Kansas Nurse Leadership and Workforce Center.

Kansas is one of like 11 states that do not have a leadership center and a workforce center for nursing.

And we are working hard to get that going and in place, and that is going to help address some of the needs of rural Kansas.

We heard a creative idea the other day that perhaps we could even have a loan program where a nurse from Dodge City, Kansas, might be able to come to Stormont and learn more about the critical care unit there.

And a nurse from Stormont could go to Dodge City and learn more about, you know, rural care and what has to happen in the facilities in that area.

Carol, you want to add.

So collaboration with the education and with the service or the acute care.

But a couple steps that I think is is very important to just remind people... eighty-four hospitals in Kansas are what's called critical access hospitals, and that means they have twenty-five beds or less.

That's the largest in the United States.

So Kansas is very rural, has 84 critical access hospitals.

And then in addition, there's great projections that financially those small hospitals are going to struggle financially and that there are projections that a number of Kansas rural hospitals here are at risk of closure.

Now that impacts those communities, like Libby said, travel.

How do I get to the next closest facility and think about being in a remote rural area, a farming area, and have an accident.

So it impacts everybody.

And people want to go to the closest area having to come to Topeka for some people is hard.

And so I think there's a lot to think about when you look at rural Kansas and if you only have four nurses on duty in a hospital because it's so small and one person leaves then you've got a nursing shortage, that's a huge impact.

That's 25% of your your staff.

Oh, man.

I heard a lot from you guys.

We talked about COVID.

We talked about you guys being innovative, retirement, kind of the future.

And I kind of want to delve into COVID.

We were talking about some of the things that happened as a result of COVID like telehealth.

And we were also talking about remote work, which I find fascinating.

And so I think I'll start with you this time, Libby.

Tell us how COVID impacted you and led you to do some innovative things.

It really did.

It made us of course, we had to have students at home.

We had to set up parameters for what happens when you're online doing online education only.

But it helped us to see that we could do some simulation experiences.

Now, in reality, we have to have our nursing students touching patients, learning how to communicate, looked at someone and connect.

But we could get across some practice ready skills doing that remotely, doing that through a semi virtual simulation.

The whole industry has really bloomed in terms of having more virtual simulation possibilities.

I mean, we, we are those of us who are older are getting on our goggles and seeing how we can have this virtual patient that we work with.

We can listen to their lungs sounds, we can actually have experiences virtually that you might not see during your clinical experience because they're not a common experience to happen.

But quality and safety is forefront in nursing.

And so we have to make sure those nurses can be safe.

And in Kansas in particular, many of our nursing students may go back to their local communities, which are more rural setting, where they may not see those kinds of events day by day.

And if we can help them to learn about that virtually, it really makes a difference.

It also allowed us to to appreciate the work/life balance, to begin to look at, you know, how can we provide this care.

Students like having some of the things online rather than face to face.

So can we balance that more?

I think it made us more creative.

We also collaborate very closely.

Baker University is at Stormont Vail Health.

And so we were able to directly talk to H.R.

there about, can we look at different shifts for nursing students so that can help balance.

The other thing that was great that we did, the students got experience giving immunizations more than they ever would have before they did the COVID vaccines.

And we're part of that.

All of our local Washburn and Baker in Topeka helped out Stormont, Vail Health.

And then at one point I heard there was a shortage in the linens.

So we took our nursing students down to the laundry at Stormont and and we got to sort linen in.

You might think...that's nursing education?

Well, it helps you.

The students said, I'm no longer going to throw all the, you know, take as much linen into the room and then have to throw it down the laundry chute if we dont use it.

I'm going to be a better steward.

So I think that COVID helped us to kind of appreciate each other more and to look at things through a fresh lens.

I agree with everything that Libby has said.

And, you know, from my perspective, we've really listened to frontline staff from a shared governance perspective.

If you want to know how to make improvements, it does not need to be leadership deciding that.

You go to the people the experts, doing the job and ask them.

And so we do a lot of what we called professional governance.

And the nurses have their governance councils.

They look at their practice, they look at what they're doing and how they can improve.

And during COVID, things needed to change so quickly, you kind of got away from that.

We were trying to see what the state regulations were.

Are we following everything we're supposed to do?

And decisions were being made quickly.

And it's it's now time to get back to basics.

And some of the things we learned, we will continue to do.

Some of the things that we did, If we repeated them, we'd probably do them differently.

But from a nursing perspective, and I wanted to just kind of key off what Lib said during the height of the pandemic, we used virtual nursing to to assist the nurses so that when you're gowned up, you want to do everything, you want to batch your care, so you're not going in and out of that room.

And then if you could have somebody outside the room assisting with a lot of what you're doing, you're saving PPE, protective equipment.

You didn't know if you're going to get enough protective equipment.

And so we really look to see how could we be safe, how could we utilize everybody right person doing the right job?

Did we have people working at the top of their license and put the nurse where they really needed to be?

And you know, Stormont was one place that we really continued clinicals.

I did not want the nursing students to not graduate, so we continued that and a lot of other schools asked if they could do clinicals there, and I said, as long as we're safe.

And yes, because in my mind as a chief nurse, it's very important to keep people graduating because we're going to need them.

Virtual nursing, though.

Now, how we use that is it's very, very popular.

There's a lot of people because of child care issues, working remotely, its very important to them.

And so they help with admissions and discharges.

But the the the nurse that's face to face really needs to trust that they have a partner with that remote nurse and that they are hand in hand with delivering that patient care.

So it takes work.

It's very doable.

You can use you know, you listen to artificial intelligence and all the things to come.

And I think that we will, based upon the shortage, we're going to start looking at things in a very different way to be able to provide care.

But in the you know, from the bottom of my heart, there's nothing that's going to change that touch and that compassion.

And you're going to need somebody at that bedside showing kind, compassionate care to the families.

And I believe that's the role of the registered nurse, the care manager.

All right.

What about you, Linda?

What are you seeing?

And hearing the voice of nurses and how did COVID help you there?

Absolutely.

One of the things I did want to follow up with what Carol and Libby has said as it relates to virtual nursing, the American Nurses Association, as well as the states, we're working on some national standards related to virtual nursing, as Carol has said, that's become very popular.

Another area where nurses are needed, it gives an opportunity to actually have retired expert nurses be available and come back into the workforce to assist the younger nurses.

Because one of the things that we're hearing both at a national and state level is that nurses feel like when they graduate, they're beginning their career, but they need that mentoring, that residency piece, and we can't rush that.

There's been discussion from a legislative perspective from different, different individuals that maybe we can speed up the education process of the nurse.

But there are certain competencies that nurses need.

We bring a unique skill set to the health care profession.

There's really ten domains that we need to cover and we need that time to be able to prepare those nurses.

So graduating individuals quicker, faster may not be the answer to the workforce shortage.

But again, I believe and from a voice perspective of the nurse, we just really need to be thinking about creative ways for staffing to meet that workforce shortage as well as to ensure that, again, as I have said before, we need to really make sure that we're valuing the nurse and some of the things, Carol share is as far as shared governance and that nurses want their voices heard.

They want to know that their needs are being met.

So that's just extremely important.

And really the focus of what we do from a standpoint of the Kansas State Nurses Association as well as the American Nurses Association, Libby, you touched on something interesting that that I heard everyone talk about.

I think a lot of people think of nurses as the people that are in the hospital there.

But what I hear you guys saying is that the profession is so diverse and there's so many ways to use nurses.

So why don't you tell us some of the ways that if people are watching, they can get involved if they were interested?

Absolutely.

Nursing really is everywhere.

It's in the community with community based nursing, public health, nursing.

Nursing obviously is in acute care settings.

Long term care environments, post acute environments.

So what can individuals do that are interested maybe in entering the health profession and specifically hopefully nursing?

Ensure that you call up a local hospital.

Visit with their HR Department.

Do an internship.

Shadow a nurse.

Shadow a nurse.

Find out the day in the life of a nurse.

We have a real deficit in the number of nurses that are applying to become nurses, or I should say individuals who are applying to become nurses.

I think the last statistic I saw was 2020, and that was about 91,000 slots in nursing nursing education programs across the United States have not been met.

So I really encourage everyone to find out about nursing again.

And we need you.

We need you in the profession.

Why don't you tell us one thing you want us to know for somebody that's watching that may be interested in nursing?

I think that I would like to ask for your help and give people a reason to go into health care careers, specifically nursing.

There's a lot of resources out there.

They're scholarships.

There's so many people that would be glad to help give information, help shepherd and steward.

So we need more health care providers, we need more nurses.

And you can contact any of us.

And we need to give people a reason to go into health care.

There's so much personal reward and it's a privilege to care for people.

And I think that once you feel that people tell their stories, that will we'll get this addressed.

It's not going to be one thing that addresses this.

It's going to be a lot of different initiatives.

And Libby, what about you?

Well, the educational process of becoming a nurse is really a journey.

You learn a lot.

You learn about critical thinking and clinical judgment and how to notice things and how to assess them and how to respond to them and how to evaluate it.

But it all leads to one of the most rewarding careers.

I can't speak enough about how great it is, and it's wonderful to have people come up and say, I remember you.

You made a difference in my life.

And that's what nurses hear day in and day out.

Carol ,Libby, Linda, thank you so much for being here with us today.

And we really appreciate your expertise and your insightful knowledge on this topic.

That's all the time we have for this episode of IGI.

If you have any comments or suggestions for future topics, send us an email at issues@ktwu.org If you would like to view this program again or any previous episode of IGI, visit us online at watch.ktwu.org For IGI Im LaTiffany Obozele and thank you for watching.

This program is brought to you with support from the Lewis H. Humphries Charitable Trust., and from the Friends of KTWU.