Oregon Health Care Employers Hamstrung by Staffing Shortage
As an intensive care nurse in a Portland cardio- vascular unit, Jazzy Walker lived through the COVID burnout that’s driven nurses from the industry and exacerbated widespread nursing shortages across Oregon’s healthcare system. She watched as some of her most seasoned col- leagues broke down under the strain of heavy workloads with increasingly sick patients, and she felt team dynamics change as hospitals called in short-term travel nurses to fill staff gaps.
When the stress got to Walker, prompting panic attacks and sleepless nights, she decided to move from bedsides to academia and focus on building the future nursing workforce. Four months into her job as the nurse administrator at Clackamas Community College, Walker is up against the chicken and egg situation impeding Oregon’s higher education institutions from meeting healthcare industry needs. Nurses can’t make as much money teaching as they do helping patients, which makes nurse edu- cators hard to hire. That instructor shortage limits the number of students that nursing programs can enroll, preventing Oregon colleges from graduating enough nurses to meet state workforce needs. Short staffing in both settings means fewer nurse educators are available to train students in hands-on clinical settings, further limiting the number and experience of nursing grads. “It is a very ugly cycle,” Walker said. Oregon’s nursing programs produced the third fewest graduates per-capita of any state in 2020, according to the Oregon Longitudinal Data Collaborative, which analyzes data across Oregon’s education and workforce landscapes. “Most of our schools have programs. It’s a capacity issue,” said Tracy Thompson, policy analyst for nursing education at the Oregon State Board of Nursing. “There’s no faculty to support addi- tional students.” An upcoming report from the collaborative, expected in February, will recommend that the state convene a workgroup to address nursing faculty pay and estabilsh a centralized clinical 15
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