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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.
Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com.
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