Louisiana is in the midst of a nursing shortage. Now, local health care officials are preparing to launch what they think will ease that shortage.
"Although we have a bedside nursing shortage, the clinical faculty shortage is even greater," Leanne Fowler, the director of the nurse practitioner program at the LSU Health New Orleans School of Nursing, told WWL's Tommy Tucker. "(With) the nurses that we have in place, we want to build their skills to include not just the clinical skills but the nursing education skills to support new nurses coming into the workforce."
According to Folwer, LSU Health will begin teaching its nurses the skills they'll need to educate the next generation of nursing students. She says any nurse in Louisiana will be eligible for the program.
"We will have about 40 hours of development to pair that down into about 15 hours of development for just the basic clinical education skills for our existing nursing workforce so that they can support a new nursing workforce," Fowler said of the free program. "We especially want to partner with clinical agencies and professional nursing organizations or any other kind of healthcare organization who hires nurses from underserved or rural areas."
Fowler says this could be the first step to address a crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We want to build the capacity, the confidence, (and) the competence of the workforce that is in place so that we can support new nurses coming into the workforce much better," Fowler said.
