BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Staring down 10,000 empty nursing positions around Maryland, state hospital officials and local nursing schools announced a multimillion-dollar plan Monday to help fill those scrubs.

“By 2015, we intend to significantly fill those vacancies,” said Cal Pierson, president of the Maryland Hospital Association. “We are the first state to produce results of this magnitude. We intend to erase [the shortage] over a 10-year period.”

Dubbed the Who Will Care campaign, the plan calls for an increase of 1,800 first-year nursing students and training 360 additional faculty members at schools throughout the Baltimore region. Maryland would provide $34 million in the first year and $25 million in year two, after which nursing schools should be able to take over the cost of classrooms, nursing education programs and faculty salaries.

The addition of new nurses will act as an economic engine for state taxes, said Janet Allan, dean and professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Allan predicted additional nurses have the potential to not only help hospital patients but also generate more than $6.7 million to the state.

“It doesn’t take a long-term financial commitment to achieve this plan,” said Leslie Simmons of Carroll Hospital Center. “We need to offer competitive salaries reflecting the growing market.”

“We are stretched beyond capacity, and the nursing shortage continues to grow,” said Dean Carol Eustis of the Community College of Baltimore County. The college’s School of Health Professions alone had to turn away more than 280 nursing applicants.

Hershaw Davis Jr. was one of 400 qualified nursing applicants rejected from the University of Maryland School of Nursing. Two thousand students were turned away from nursing programs statewide.

“They just didn’t have the resources available,” said Davis, 34. He applied for the first time in 2003. “The clinical portion of the programs requires a low student-to-teacher ratio. If the universities had more money, I know we could produce more nurses.”

lduffy@baltimoreexaminer.com

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6:22 AM MST on Thu., Feb. 7, 2008 re: "Nurses lead charge on clean, healthy workplaces"

J corbinExaminer said:
To Paxon, I feel your pain...while at work I too was injured by inhaling fumes from the products used to strip and wax the floor at the hospital where I worked. I had told the environmental employees on multiple occasions that the solvents used made me sick and asked them to wait until a day I was off to do the floors. This usually worked however on one particular day I wasd told the inspectors were coming and they had to do the floors. I ended up with not only a migrane headache but chemical burns to my sinuses that took weeks of steroids and antibiotics to clear...but the floors were clean and shiney for inspection.

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11:59 AM MST on Sat., Nov. 10, 2007 re: "New plan hopes to ease nursing shortage in Md."

Examiner Reader said:
The nursing shortage is caused, basically, by three different things: (1) "Monopoly capitalism", (2) Gender discrimination against men in nursing, and, (3) The absolute and almost arbitrary authority that clinical instructors have to fail nursing students in their clinicals. In "Monopoly capitalism", "capital" is exported from the native country instead of the finished products of production produced by the native citizenry. What is "capital"? Capital is labor, money, and industry. In the case of nursing in the USA, there has been a massive immigration into the USA of foreign born nurses such that the same now represents about 30%-40% of American nurses. "Monopoly capitalism" tends to destroy the two main attributes of "true capitalism" which are competition and free enterprise. " Monopoly capitalism tends to impoverish the native citizenry (nursing work force) which concentrating both economic and political power in the monpolists.

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8:50 AM MST on Tue., Nov. 6, 2007 re: "New plan hopes to ease nursing shortage in Md."

ER girl said:
If it means that I can be seen quicker when I am in the emergency room, I'm all for it!

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