About the School
The University of Kansas School of Nursing is graduating more students today than ever before, presented Dean Karen L. Miller, RN, PhD, FAAN, at her annual state of the school presentation.
Miller, who also serves as senior vice chancellor for academic and student affairs at the University of Kansas Medical Center, recently addressed faculty. She said the KU School of Nursing had 522 students in the Fall 2005 class. Of those, 308 were undergraduate students and 214 were graduate students. This reflects a 22% increase in graduate enrollment over 2004.
Last year, the KU School of Nursing graduated 195 students -- 138 were undergraduate and 57 were graduate. And in the School’s 100 year history, 5,000 students have graduated with 3,000 currently working in Kansas. And that’s a good percentage of nurses remaining in the state, Miller told faculty.
Kansas employs 125,000 health care professionals and staff, with 32,500 being Registered Nurses. When looking at the nursing job outlook for Kansas, it is estimated that 28,973 nurses will be needed by 2010. The total number of new nurses needed by 2010 is 11,350.
But with a shortage of health care professionals predicted, especially for nurses, 195 KU graduates per year will not be enough to meet the demand for clinical nurses, nurse leaders and faculty.
So we all need to do more, Miller said. She outlined the many things the KU Medical Center, specifically the KU School of Nursing, has been doing to help with the shortage.
In 1994, the Kansas Collaborative Primary Care Nurse Practitioner Program was created. A total of 649 nurse practitioner students have graduated, serving 91 counties. The Bi-State Nurse Midwifery Program was created in 2002 and has graduated 20 nurse midwives. Distance education programs for rural parts of the state, including the online RN-BSN Degree Completion Program, help make furthering a nurse’s education easier. Other programs include the statewide placement of students, TeleHealth technologies, special grant programs, the Kansas Continuing Learning Project, KUMC/Kansas Department of Health and Environment State Health Care Workforce Project and internal evaluation of Kansas’ future needs for physicians and other providers through the KUMC Healthcare Provider Workforce Board.
In addition to KU’s efforts, Miller has been meeting with legislators and the Kansas Board of Regents to develop a plan for increasing the number of nurses.
The Kansas Board of Regents submitted a proposal to the Kansas Legislature to annually increase the number of nurses in the state, by all state-funded schools, by 250 each year. This proposal would cost an estimated $11 million, but would help put more new nurses into the workforce at a time of critical need.
"This funding would support educating 250 more (nurses) per year in the State of Kansas, and that would help," Miller said.
The Kansas Legislative recommendations are to increase the number of nursing faculty; to increase clinical site availability; address classroom, lab and equipment needs; to create a Center of Excellence for Health Care Workforce Development; to manage program effectiveness and funding accountability; to develop a Statewide Nursing Workforce Consortium; and to create collaborative partnerships.
The KU School of Nursing’s role in this plan would be to educate more nursing faculty, more nurse leaders, and more graduate-level nurses in a variety of clinical specialties.
"People get the sense that in order to have more entry level nurses, you need more faculty and other kinds of advanced practice nurses," Miller said.
Other health care professionals, including medical and allied health professionals, also are experiencing shortages. To help ease the shortage of all professionals, Miller said we need to increase the recruitment of teaching and research faculty, increase school enrollments to meet the need for clinical providers and leaders in health care organizations, increase post-graduate physician residency numbers and increase efforts to achieve appropriate geographic distribution of graduates.
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The University of Kansas Medical Center