BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Gov. Martin O’Malley included $8.8 million in his budget for an ongoing program to expand the number of nursing graduates in Maryland.

But he did not fund the additional $11 million to $34 million state hospitals and nursing schools were hoping to get for a new initiative to double the number of nurses educated in Maryland by boosting the number and salaries of faculty.

“We’re still hoping that funds will be redirected to this initiative,” said Jessica Ronan, Maryland Hospital Association spokeswoman.

“We will have over 10,000 vacancies for nursing jobs” in coming years, Pegeen Townsend, legislative policy director for the Maryland Hospital Association, told a Senate committee Wednesday.

“We are at capacity and beyond,” said Carol Eustis, dean of health professions at the Community College of Baltimore County, the largest nursing program in Maryland. In 2006, across the state, nursing programs turned away 1,900 qualified applicants. “Students are ready to fill the gap,” Eustis said.

“We are experiencing a public health crisis in Maryland,” said Carolyn Yocum of the University of Maryland School of Nursing. The biggest problem is recruiting and retaining qualified faculty to staff the clinically intensive training for nurses. “I do not have the adequate number of faculty,” Yocum said.

The $8.8 million nursing program O’Malley funded, financed by a charge on hospital rates, is used to prepare for nursing faculty, help retain nursing students in the program and help other health professionals transition into nursing, according to Paula Fitzwater, grants administrator at the Maryland Higher Education Commission.

The new money for the nursing initiative called “Who Will Care?” would be used to boost salaries for nursing faculty above the $75,000 current average. Currently, nursing graduates with a two-year associate degree “will make more than my nursing faculty,” said Beth Anne Batturs, head of nursing at Anne Arundel Community College.

The proposal calls for a combination of public and private funding that would be sustained in future years by the savings hospitals would gain by reducing their use of temporary staffing.

llazarick@baltimoreexaminer.com

Comments from Examiner Readers

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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