Mainebiz

V O L . X X I I I N O. X I M AY 1 5 , 2 0 1 7 24 M aine is facing a growing shortage of nurses, a situation that aff ects every person in a state where health care goes hand-in- hand with an aging population. Help is on the way. Colleges and universities are investing in new programs to train nurses. e state's health care, academic and government communi- ties hope to address the issue with plans for an upcoming nursing summit. eir deliberations will likely be of interest to the business community as it plans for the future of its health and wellness programs. "We have hundreds of nursing vacancies across state," says Lisa Harvey McPherson, Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems' vice president for government relations and co-chair of the Maine Nursing Action Coalition. "Hospitals, nursing homes, home care providers, we all need nurses right now." Facing the nursing 'cliff' By 2025, there could be a shortage of 3,200 nurses, according to a forecast commissioned by the Maine Nursing Action Coalition. e situation cre- ates a puzzle of many pieces. e shortage is largely a problem of age — but Maine gets hit from three directions. 1 Maine's nurses are aging: 30% of full-time equivalent nurses are ages 55 to 64, without enough young nurses or nursing education capac- ity to replace them upon retire- ment through 2025. Some 12,000 nurses are age 45 or over, compared to 7,764 nurses age 44 and under. 2 Maine's nursing faculty is aging: 32% of Maine's full-time nursing faculty is over the age of 60. 3 Maine's overall population is aging: e senior population is projected to grow by 37% by 2025. Age has a signif- icant impact on inpatient demand for services in most health care settings. e forecast projects Maine will need to increase the number of newly licensed nurses by approximately 20% each year to solve the projected short- age and avoid impacts on care levels. e situation isn't new. Maine cur- rently has 18,000 to 19,000 full-time RNs. But that's not enough: e state already has a nursing shortage. A crisis years in the making McPherson Maine Nursing Action Coalition says health systems in Maine became concerned about the nursing workforce before the reces- sion, precisely because of the aging nurse population. As it happened, she says, the reces- sion made the problem worse because health care providers didn't have the fi nances to hire as many new nurse graduates as before. "We were all fi nancially challenged," says McPherson. "So these older nurses stayed in the workforce longer than they otherwise would have, and they stayed full-time and many were the primary wage-earners and sole source of health insurance for their families. Now that we're out of recession that makes our 'retirement cliff ' issue far more severe than other parts of the country because they were already older." Health care consumerism will continue to grow as the baby boomer population ages, says Pat Cirillo, vice president of initiatives and analytics for the Center for Health Aff airs. "If you asked all health care employ- ers in Maine how many nurses they could hire tomorrow, it would probably be 1,000 to 1,500," says Cirillo. e ability to fi ll that gap is aff ected by a shortage of nursing program educators, themselves aging, with 32% of full-time educators over age 60. According to a report by the University of Southern Maine: ¡ Vacant full-time faculty positions statewide nearly doubled (10 to 19) from 2013 to 2015. ¡ Full-time nursing faculty fell from 169 positions to 130 from 2013 to 2015. Maine now graduates about 900 nurses a year with a range of degrees, from two-year associate through bach- elor of nursing science and onward to master and doctoral degrees, says Terry Colby, professor of nursing at the University of Maine in Augusta. Colby, who co-chairs a committee across the University of Maine System nursing programs, says one priority is to assess how nursing education can impact the nursing shortage. But there's limited capacity for expanding graduate numbers. "We don't have enough nursing faculty currently to fi ll positions and expand programs," Colby says. "In the next fi ve years, with the average age of nursing faculty now 60, there is the potential they will retire and/or not work as much and move on to other things in life. So we need to not only make sure we're attracting people who want to practice nursing but who also want to be nurse educators." Four campuses in the University of Maine System have pre-licensure entry-level bachelor degree programs for nursing, says Colby. All of the state's community colleges have asso- ciate degree nursing program. Several private colleges also have bachelor programs. And Colby says university programs are full to capacity. "We have the nursing programs in the state," says Colby. "But if we're not graduating enough students now, the question to answer is how many more nurses do we need to graduate each year to be able to fi ll that workforce Lisa Harvey McPherson, Eastern Maine Healthcare System's vice president for government relations, says Maine has hundreds of nursing vacancies and too few people to fi ll them. P H O T O / DAV I D C L O U G H Calling all nurses Colleges respond to Maine's growing need for nurses B y L a u r i e S c h r e i b e r F O C U S

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