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Since the program has been advertised, the school has received about 6,500 inquiries, said Mary Turner, RDH-MS, dean of Sacramento City College Science and Allied Health Division.

Sharp HealthCare, which offers a handful of grants and scholarships to potential nurses or nurses who want more education, has entered a similar partnership with the University of California, San Diego. Sharp and other health care facilities in the area give the school $560,000 annually through a program called Nurses Now, which funds faculty and lab costs. Donating health organizations also provide clinical practice space to students.

As a result, UCSD increased enrollment from 50 to 90 students per semester and hired three tenure-track professors last year, said Patricia Wahl, RN, PhD, FAAN, director of UCSD’s school of nursing

Adding faculty and increasing enrollment cause their own set of bottlenecks. Sometimes prerequisites are not available — especially in public universities suffering from budget cuts — and clinical practice is harder to schedule.

New staffing ratios may help, but clinical instructors also may have more time to train on night shifts, when most students are at home. Taking advantage of off-peak facility times is one way Grossmont College in San Diego has expanded its nursing programs to attract students who do not fit the usual college mold.

Students with day jobs or families now can attend a weekend and evening associate degree nursing program, said Elisabeth Hamel, RN, PhD, associate dean of Grossmont College’s Health Professions Programs.

“We have had so many students come in through the doors saying they can only do the evening/weekend program,” she said.

The school now makes use of its classrooms at night, too, and the students do their clinical rotations at hospitals on the weekends when there is less competition for practice time.

Hamel secured $110,000 from the Grossmont Healthcare District, which allowed the first 20 students to start in January 2002. Later, Scripps Health joined the collaboration, allowing the school to add more students.

Grossmont also has created more space for students through a program that offers an associate nursing degree to foreign health care professionals, most of whom were physicians before coming to the United States.

“Some of them have been bus drivers, some have been phlebotomists, one is a guard in a shopping center,” Hamel said. None practiced medicine in the United States: some failed medical licensing exams, others could not get internships to practice as physicians.

With funding from Sharp Healthcare, Grossmont screened students for language skills and started its first class of 35 nursing students in August.

“I tried to value what they knew,” Hamel said. “Yet they still struggled with things nurses know that physicians don’t, like putting somebody on the bedpan or giving an injection.”

Experience counts

Other schools have tapped into what they hope is a dedicated nurse workforce with a proven track record of school success: baccalaureate holders interested in nursing as a second career. Most of these programs end in a master’s in nursing.

Samuel Merritt College in Oakland and Sacramento, which offers the traditional baccalaureate and master’s degrees in nursing, is one of four schools to offer an accelerated master’s degree in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Audrey Berman, RN, PhD, interim dean of the school of nursing, said her school’s 16-month program puts practicing nurses into the workforce as well as prepares potential instructors.

“Entry-level master’s [students] sometimes have degrees in teaching or science,” she said. “They already have another area of expertise that fits perfectly with becoming a nurse or nurse faculty.”

Roberta Boshears was already an LVN with a bachelor’s in gerontology before she entered the school’s program. Although she could have attended junior college for two years for her nursing license, she opted instead to spend the two years in the intensive master’s course. She notices her enthusiasm for nursing is shared by many of her classmates.

“The minute everybody got their license, it was like this letter from heaven — they all went to work,” she said.

Samuel Merritt also is developing an accelerated BSN program for the same candidate pool, Berman said. The school expects to admit students to the one-year program in June.