Open the Door
Well-designed refresher programs will allow nursing employers to top into underused resource

By Catherine Tkach, MSN, RN
February 27, 2003

I'm ready for nursing, but is nursing ready for me? Supposedly, the nursing shortage has become a crisis, and a crisis calls for prompt, creative mobilization of resources. So, where are the nurse refresher courses?

I live in Northern California, about 60 minutes from two major metropolitan areas. My 9 million neighbors and I are served by world-class hospitals, premier universities with teaching hospitals and outstanding private colleges; yet, in this milieu, only four nurse refresher courses are available.

Of these four, two are offered by junior colleges, one by a private nurse educator and one by an agency that gives the enrollment challenge of providing neither phone nor e-mail access on its Web site. One course refuses candidates who have been out of nursing for more than 15 years, and they all turn out only a handful of nurses.

Why aren't potential nursing employers involved in this? Offering a mechanism (nurse refresher course) for a product that the market declares is in critical demand is good business. Why are employers instead squandering their money on sign-up bonuses to lure nurses? This will never generate the critical mass of nurses needed.

How to go about tapping into the pool of former nurses? Some suggestions for public health agencies, hospitals, clinics, any potential employer:

• Create nurses aide opportunities for returning nurses. Make these short-term, part-time positions in order to give returnees a chance to provide care and survey the nursing landscape. At the same time, you increase your labor pool and have a chance to evaluate returnees.
  
• Likewise, encourage returnees to work with or as a unit secretary/clerical staff in order to enhance familiarity with drugs and procedures.
  
• Design curriculum in conjunction with the state board of nursing and by reviewing other refresher courses. The scarcity of these will make this a brief review process. Have the program coordinated by your institution's nurse recruiter and nursing administration.

Too much work? Couldn't be any more work than the present frustrating job of trying to find nursing staff.

• Recruit inhouse expertise for the various presentations in the course. Most nurses would relish the chance to share their knowledge and would appreciate the acknowledgement of their skills that being tapped as a speaker for this course would bring.
  Publicize your course in nursing publications, community newspapers, soccer newsletters (soccer moms had lives before soccer), gym and athletic club inserts-the list is endless.
• Post the program on your state board of nursing Web site. Emphasize clearly that your institution values returning nurses both for their previous nursing experiences and for their life experiences since.
  

Prepare for the deluge.

• And, of course, charge for this. Charge because this program, like any health care provider education, is labor-intensive. Charge so that you can give your inhouse speakers payment, which enhances their sense of value in the institution. Work with your institution's administration and with the board of nursing for pricing such a course and for any nonprofit/for-profit issues.
  

I am a master's-prepared nurse who, for more than a decade, worked variously as a nurse practitioner, college instructor and clinical coordinator of an outpatient department. Then, for two decades, I was home raising four children.

My next decade? Well, I had hoped it would be nursing. But is nursing ready for me?

Catherine Anthony Tkach, MSN, RN, works part time as a nurses aide and a unit secretary at Sutter Davis Hospital in Davis, Calif. She worked as a nurse practitioner at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, as an instructor in physical assessment, med/surg nursing, nutrition and public health nursing at Northwestern University, as a clinical coordinator of the outpatient department at Evanston (Ill.) Hospital and as a public health nurse volunteer and Spanish translator at St. Joseph's Center in Venice, Calif.

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