Nursing shortage is linked to instructors’ salaries

Saturday, Aug. 19, 2006 | 7:27 a.m.

ELKO - The giant elephant threatening to squash university regents' plans to double the state's output of nurses by 2013 may not be the $62 million price tag.

Instead, it may be the challenge of recruiting and keeping nursing instructors.

UNLV will fill all its open nursing positions for the first time in 10 years mainly because regents approved $100,000-plus salaries Thursday for five new professors. That's not an option for Nevada State College or the Community College of Southern Nevada, which do not have the money or the flexibility to offer those paychecks, presidents said.

If the Legislature and the Board of Regents want the state's colleges and universities to double their capacity to train nurses, salaries need to be part of the plan, CCSN President Richard Carpenter said. The interim Legislative Committee on Health Care asked higher education officials this summer to increase the state's nurse training capacity by 1,570 students by 2013 to offset a national nurse shortage.

Having already doubled their capacity with limited state funding in 2003, Southern Nevada schools have no room to add students without additional money, instructors and space. Both Nevada State and CCSN had to turn away more students than they accepted this fall, the presidents said.

Nevada State had 80 qualified applicants for its 40 open slots; CCSN had more than 300 students apply for about 160 spots. UNLV put 12 students on a waiting list until January.

The plan thrown together this summer addresses many of the costs of expanding instruction - $21.8 million this biennium - but noticeably fails to address the salary issue, said Dan Klaich, executive vice chancellor. The plan does ask state lawmakers to fully fund CCSN instructors and allows it to hire enough faculty to meet required teacher-student ratios for on-the-job instruction.

Salaries at CCSN are restricted to state schedules, forcing CCSN to compete for professors in a limited market with all other state schools and area hospitals that can pay nurses more. Nurses must have master's degrees or higher to teach at all three Southern Nevada schools.

"We are at the bottom of the rung," Carpenter said. He estimates that UNLV is able to pay its bottom-level lecturers about $30,000 more than CCSN can pay .

The nursing instructor shortage keeps state schools from addressing the overall nursing shortage, which in turn drives up nursing salaries. Area hospitals are advertising salaries between $60,000 and $100,000 for nurses with bachelor's degrees or higher.

That job market drove UNLV officials to offer salaries $6,700 to $20,000 higher than the approved ranges, President David Ashley said.

Klaich and other vice chancellors are surveying area hospitals to collect better data on nursing salaries. They want to come up with a new salary schedule for the state's colleges and universities that better fits the job market and keeps state schools from "cannibalizing" each other's instructors.

Thom Reilly, former Clark County manager and the system's new vice chancellor for health sciences, is already discussing with area hospital officials how to partner with the colleges to share nurses. UNLV, for instance, hires full-time nurses as adjunct faculty, and CCSN is looking at developing similar arrangements, Reilly and Carpenter said.

Regents and state lawmakers still must sign off on the overall nursing initiative.