Experience
Counts
A veteran of four decades of nursing shortages offers her
perspective on solving today’s crisis
By Phil McPeck
November 18, 2002
Marcelline Macdonald, ME, RN, knows nursing shortages. She lived the big one of the 1960s as an OB nurse in Billings, Mont., and has survived staffing crises of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, right up to today.
“I’ve not ever been in a position where there wasn’t a shortage,” said Macdonald, who graduated from nursing school in 1950. At age 74, she serves on the president’s advisory council for nursing issues at the University of Portland, her alma mater, and also works part time at Maryville Nursing Home in Beaverton, Ore.
Macdonald’s take on the nursing shortage, nationally and in Oregon, is this:
The problem isn’t filling nursing schools, it’s filling them with the right students. For both students and faculty, it’s a matter of not enough public funding.
Macdonald said Portland-area universities and community colleges met jointly last year and decided on a recruitment blitz. “They recruited more [students] than they could take this year. There’s not enough faculty. That’s where we are.”
Until scholarships and grants are in place to lure advanced practice nurses away from the rewards of direct care and into the classroom, Macdonald said that retirees, with their wealth of experience, could take the lecterns, as well as lead students through clinicals.
In Oregon, however, licensing requirements make it impractical, if not impossible, for retired nurses to come back and work one or two days a week, Macdonald said.
To maintain an Oregon nursing license requires 900 hours of work in five years. She said retired friends, whom she sees every few weeks for coffee, tell her that to regain a lapsed license, “It’s like going back to college again.”
“Somebody who has worked within the last five years, maybe they’re not going to come back to work in critical care, I’m not saying that,” Macdonald said. “But to get people to come out of retirement and work, they’re going to have to do something with licensure. They’re going to have to be a little more flexible.”
But even with ample faculty and full nursing schools, Macdonald said the nursing shortage will persist if schools don’t get the right students.
She clearly comes from the “old school,” an RN who worked six days a week in a hospital for room and board and took out loans for tuition as she earned her bachelor’s degree. “There were no scholarships in those days,” she said.
“We have to get funding—scholarship-type money that doesn’t have to be paid back. Probably federal dollars that would be given to the kind of nurse that will stay in the profession,” Macdonald said.
“If you would go out on the streets now and talk to everybody who
would possibly be interested in nursing, the one comment you’re
going to hear from people who would make really good nurses is, ‘I
don’t have the money.’ They’re the ones who are working
service-type jobs. A lot of people are already raising a family and they
can’t mortgage the life of the family,” she said.