Idaho’s current investments in nurse education facilities and programs throughout the state will help fill vacant nursing positions and meet a projected demand for an additional 7,400 nurses over the next eight years, but according to a report released this week by the state’s Nursing Workforce Advisory Council, more needs to be done to meet a rising demand for nurse educators, practitioners, midwives and anesthetists.
According to the report, a shortage of nurses with advanced training will persist statewide and some regions of the state will continue to experience chronic vacancies across the range of nurse licensing.
A six-month analysis by the Idaho Department of Labor found that between 2007 and 2016, Idaho will need over 7,400 more nurses to fill chronic vacancies, meet the demands of growth and replace retirees and others who leave the profession. Nearly 70 percent of that increased demand – 5,100 – will be for registered nurses – a growth rate higher than the national rate. Idaho’s health care system will need another 1,600 licensed practical nurses and over 700 nurses with advanced degrees or advanced practice certificates.
By 2016 Idaho’s population age 55 and over is expected to increase by nearly 50 percent. The quality of the health care system serving these people depends on the state’s ability to meet current and future demand for health care professionals.
Assuming the investments made to date continue, the number of nursing graduates will increase an average of 5.9 percent a year over that period, producing 9,400 trained nurses. Only about 65 percent are expected to work as Idaho nurses, however. Some will leave the state and others will take up different careers.
But the more than 6,100 graduates who join Idaho’s nursing corps, which stood at 11,200 registered and 2,700 licensed practical nurses in 2008, are expected to be enough to meet the demand for those skills. The shortage of licensed practical nurses has already disappeared, and state officials expect the forecasted supply and demand for registered nurses to be in balance by 2012.
A lack of post-graduate educational programs, aggravated by limited faculty, however, means the shortage of nurses with master’s degrees, doctorates or advanced practice certificates will continue to grow.
With health care projected as Idaho’s fastest growing, highest paying industry over the next decade, there has been no lack of interest in nursing. Over 2,000 people applied for admittance to Idaho nursing programs for the 2007-2008 school year and more than 900 had to be turned away because the schools lacked the educational capacity to teach them.
In 2007, a registered nurse with a bachelor’s degree averaged $59,000 a year, nearly twice the average annual wage in Idaho, while a nursing program educator averaged less than $49,000, according to the department’s Occupational Wage Survey.
In 2007, Idaho nursing schools had 166 full-time and 72 part-time or adjunct faculty members, but on average drew fewer than two applicants for every faculty opening.
Over half the instructors are over 50, and half of them plan to retire in the next five years. Just 10 percent of all faculty are under age 40. A complicating factor is only one in five faculty members has a doctorate while one in four is teaching with only a bachelor’s degree.
Idaho currently lacks doctoral programs to prepare advanced faculty and has only limited capacity to offer master’s-level programs. Idaho State University is proposing an eight-seat doctoral program and masters’ programs at both ISU and Boise State University are limited.
The biggest discrepancy between faculty and private sector salaries involves nurses with Advanced Practice Professional Nursing certificates. As educators they earn only 57 percent of what they could earn in health care. Nurse educators with master’s degrees find their situation nearly as bad – 65 percent of what they could make in health care practice. Nurses with bachelor’s degrees who stay in the classroom earn 79 percent of their health care practice counterparts. Nurses with doctorates are the only exception because on average, they make the same in the classroom and in health care settings.
The report was funded by the Idaho Legislature and conducted at the request of the Idaho Nursing Workforce Advisory Council. To review the full report and the council’s recommendations, visit the Idaho Department of Labor Web site at labor.idaho.gov and click on the first link under What’s Hot.