The COVID-19 pandemic has upended nearly every aspect of our everyday lives–everything from the way we work to where we eat to who we spend time with. The fallout from the pandemic has also brought into sharp relief California’s failure to educate the healthcare workers we need as we wrestle with an aging population, a wave of healthcare worker retirements and the threat of future pandemics.
Even before the COVID-19 outbreak began, California was facing a critical nursing shortage. The refusal by the state’s Board of Registered Nursing to act during the recent crisis underscores how it remains stuck in the past and is keeping California from educating the nurses it will need to meet current and future needs.
Study after study shows California simply does not have enough skilled healthcare workers to meet our growing demand. In California alone, there is an expected demand for almost 450,000 new allied healthcare workers through 2024, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Those needs are profound in Orange County. Over the last two years, job postings for registered nurses, speech language pathologists, and ICU nurses nearly doubled countywide.
In a BSN Employer Survey conducted last year, Table 1, 74% of participants throughout Southern California, including 19% of participants living in Orange County, agreed that the retiring/aging population of nurses will impact employer demand for BSN nurses over the next 10 years.
In short, we are not educating and graduating the nurses we need to meet our local demand.
The rapid rate of retirement among registered nurses is only increasing that demand. According to the Journal of Nursing Regulation, more than 1 million nurses are expected to retire over the next decade.
“The departure of such a large cohort of experienced RNs means that patient care settings and other organizations that depend on RNs will face a significant loss of nursing knowledge and expertise that will be felt for years to come,” the journal states.
Failure to keep pace with our healthcare workforce needs will have direct, harmful effects on patients. As the California Future Healthcare Workforce Commission found, “the looming crisis will be most acute in primary care, behavioral health, and among workers who care for older adults.”
If we are going to keep pace with our nursing needs, we must transform the way we educate and train the nurses of tomorrow. The Bureau of Registered Nursing’s response—or lack of response—to the COVID-19 pandemic shows a state bureaucracy that is dangerously out of touch and ill equipped to address our future nursing needs.
California normally requires 75% of a nursing student’s clinical education to be in a hospital, with the remaining 25% allowed to be taught through a simulation. Across the country, other states quickly passed emergency regulations that ensured the pipeline of nurses could continue.
Many other states already allow more simulated clinical hours than California does. States including Florida, Texas and New York allow students to split their clinical education between simulated and in-person hours. New York was among many states that expanded that ration during the pandemic to ensure that students on the brink of graduation could get the training they need, and would be available to help serve their communities, both through the COVID-19 crisis and for years to come.
When it comes to how we educate nurses, California has been behind the times, predominantly because the California Board of Registered Nursing refuses to adapt to technological and educational changes that have already been implemented in other states.
As we emerge from the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis, we must take stock of our healthcare system, and move swiftly to address the systemic obstacles that threaten our healthcare system. We need reform to create a modern nursing education system that truly fits the needs of our changing state and ensures California has the healthcare workers we need to meet our state’s needs.
We cannot let the needs of millions of Californians be stifled by a bureaucracy that remains mired in the past, and out of touch with the needs of our people. By making common sense reforms to the way we train, educate and graduate nurses, California can ensure it has the caregivers it needs to serve the needs of all patients.
Editor’s Note: David Pyle is CEO of American Career College in Irvine, which has more than 50,000 graduates in healthcare fields like nursing and dental assistants, and executive chairman of Irvine’s West Coast University, which offers healthcare degree programs. The Business Journal in May honored him as one of 50 OC executives making a difference during the coronavirus pandemic for donating more than $450,000 in $1,000 gift cards to employees of his favorite restaurants.
