Nursing Shortage & How CTE Programs Can Support
In a recent publication by the American Nurses Association (ANA) they reported on the decrease in supply and increase in demand for nurses. “Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing shortages occurred on and off due to factors such as economic downturns, waves of retiring nurses, and increased health care demand.” On top of this, we are now facing increased demand for nurses due to COVID-19!
CTE programs can be a pathway to provide solutions to remedy this imbalance. Here is our breakdown:
| Problem | Solution |
|---|---|
| A need for more people to enter the field of nursing | Students who are engaged at the high school level are motivated to enter healthcare and specifically nursing due to the CTE courses available to them. |
| A need for nurse extenders | There will be an increased demand for nurse extenders. These individuals have competency-based education and can work under the supervision of a nurse. There will also be a demand for allied health providers to support nurses. CTE programs can support students who want to pursue this pathway. |
| Nurse educators will be retiring, and more need to be recruited | Standardized simulation-based education will allow educators to fine-tune procedure performance instead of training from scratch. This will allow nurse educators to train a greater number of students. |
To address these shortages, it is important now more than ever to expose high school students to various career pathways in the medical field. “Changing demographics and its demands on the health care system means more nurses will be needed in practice areas such as telehealth, home health, long-term care and rehabilitation, and outpatient care centers.”
We work with CTE programs to support teachers with curriculum and procedure training that allows students to gain a competency-based digital badge. This, in turn, exposes them to careers and provides them with documentation for internships, colleges, and jobs showing their competency journey.
Learn more about how SimRated can work with your existing program or help you develop a new medical CTE pathway at your school.
Cameron Ricks MD RN