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Some schools, have partnered with hospitals, with the latter supplying resources and instructors in hopes of securing future employees. Sacramento City College joined forces with a division of Sutter Health to expand enrollment.

When Thomas Quayle applied to nursing school, he had 15 years’ experience as a dialysis technician as well as a straight-A record in prerequisites, yet he was still waitlisted for entry to Sacramento City College.

“I got the thin letter instead of the fat package,” said Quayle, who had just quit an interim job as a trucker and pinned his hopes on starting school that fall to fulfill his lifelong goal of being a nurse. “I knew City College had a really good program, and I knew it was difficult to get in.”

Despite the nursing shortage, nursing schools turned away nearly 10% of qualified applicants last year, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing reported in December. In California, applicants outnumbered seats by 40%, according to a California Strategic Planning Committee for Nursing report released in 2001.

Schools face a shortage of qualified instructors, inadequate clinical training from overworked hospital staff nurses, and a lack of clinical training space. A low student-to-teacher ratio and costly equipment make nursing programs expensive for schools to maintain.

At least one program has closed. The University of Southern California graduates its last nursing class this summer. Citing its private status, the school indicated it was not receiving enough tuition and private donations to continue the program.

Michael Diamond, vice president and executive vice provost, said in a press release that the nursing program required “too large an investment for too small of a program.”

Room for everyone

However, other schools are expanding their programs to meet demand. Many have added tracks to produce nurses with advanced degrees who are qualified to teach. Others have reached out to a wider population of students, scooping up baccalaureate holders interested in nursing, or foreign health care workers. And some in education hope California’s new staffing ratio laws will give hospital nurses more time to train students.

Some schools have partnered with hospitals, with the latter supplying resources and instructors in hopes of securing future employees. Sacramento City College joined forces with a division of Sutter Health to expand enrollment. The Sutter Health Sacramento Sierra Region committed $13.6 million over five years to add an extended campus to Sacramento City College’s nursing program, said Monica Small, RN, MSN, director of the Sutter Center for Health Professions.

Although the students receive their degree from the college, they use the facilities of the hospital, including a separate renovated 27,000-square-foot extended campus that resembles a hospital wing, complete with practice mannequins, which each cost $3,000 and up.

“There is no school working off public funding that could afford what the private sector is able to do,” Small said.

Instructors from the college teach prerequisites open only to nursing students, reducing competition in an area that can bottleneck a student’s degree track. Clinical courses are taught by Sutter nurses who can, in turn, use City College instructors as mentors for teaching skills.

Finally, the region’s hospitals were scoured to find more clinical rotation space, Small said.

For Quayle, the Sutter donation meant starting nursing school on time. Two weeks after applying, he looked in his mail and found the “fat package” that meant acceptance to the extended campus, he said.

Quayle will graduate in February. He eventually wants to earn a bachelor’s degree, and in the meantime, is interested in working for Sutter, he said.

“The facilities are really nice, the nurses are happy, plus they have good incentives,” he said.

The program aims to produce 500 nurses by 2008. Rather than require graduates to work at its facilities, Sutter relies instead on students wanting to work where they have learned and practiced.