Nursing teachers in short supply

Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006 | 7:04 a.m.

From 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. three days a week, UNLV nursing instructor Kevin Gulliver zips between Las Vegas Valley hospitals in a mad rush to teach.

"I'm already behind schedule," Gulliver said Wednesday morning as he raced between helping two students administer intravenous medications and reviewing a patient's care plan with a third at Spring Valley Hospital. "That's a chronic situation."

It is also a major reason that Nevada does not have enough trained nurses. The state simply doesn't have enough nurses with the proper master's credentials to teach.

Gulliver oversees eight students in each of his rotations. Students apply the skills they've studied in the classroom to real-life patients. Each student is assigned to care for two patients a day, developing and carrying out care plans under Gulliver's supervision.

The rotations are critical to their nursing education, but the lack of teachers to oversee them is a bottleneck preventing UNLV, Nevada State College in Henderson and the Community College of Southern Nevada from producing nurses to meet Southern Nevada's health care needs, directors for the three programs said.

To ensure proper supervision, state law restricts clinical instructors to overseeing eight students at a time, said Carolyn Yucha, dean of the UNLV School of Nursing. But it also magnifies the nursing shortage.

"In another program, you can say you'll just get a larger classroom," Yucha said. "We can't do that because of the clinical requirements."

UNLV, Nevada State and CCSN all have openings for nursing professors. The schools were forced to ask current instructors to take on extra rotations to meet this semester's needs, directors said. Nevada State and CCSN both had to turn students away and UNLV may do the same this summer if it doesn't find more instructors, directors said.

Nationwide, nursing schools turned away 30,000 qualified applicants in the fall semester for lack of instructors, according to a survey by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

UNLV is attempting to bridge the gap by partnering with Valley Health Services and University Medical School, which essentially loan nurses to UNLV to cover the rotations, Yucha said.

The hospital nurses benefit because they have a chance to teach, which many find a joy, said Mary Lou Haslach-LaGrutta, director of Valley Hospital's nursery.

"My first love in nursing has always been teaching, and I get great pleasure out of being an instructor," Haslatch-LaGrutta said.

Students and hospitals alike benefit because the students are often hired by the hospital where they trained, which eases the transition for all parties, Haslatch-LaGrutta said.

Nevada State and CCSN hire full-time nurses as adjunct faculty. But because those nurses are teaching in addition to their full-time work, they often have difficulty scheduling rotations around their workload, said Connie Carpenter, State College nursing director.

Nevada State is offering rotations on Saturday and Sunday to meet the need, Carpenter said.

She sees great potential for Nevada State in partnering with hospitals, and is looking into striking such an arrangement with Mountain View Hospital.

UNLV, meanwhile, is also working on producing more students -- 43 are in the pipeline now -- with the credentials required to teach. Yucha is also seeking private scholarships to help doctorate students attend full time.

"We're pressured at both ends -- to get out the graduate students because we have a faculty shortage and to get out more undergraduates," Yucha said. "So you have to balance both goals."

Christina Littlefield can be reached at 259-8813 or at clittle@ lasvegassun.com.