For more than two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed both the importance of nurses and strain on the workforce. Hospitals, long-term care centers and even K-12 schools have been so short-staffed in recent months that they’ve had to cancel procedures, delay moving patients into inpatient beds or reduce other services. This legislative season, that sense of crisis has powered bipartisan efforts to increase nurse training and licensure.
The proposals have split somewhat along party lines, with Republican lawmakers in red states emphasizing reduced education regulations and Democrats in blue states emphasizing funding increases. Still, leaders in both parties agree on the need to get more nurses educated and helping patients.
Indiana, for example, needs to graduate 1,300 more nurses a year until 2030 to meet the state’s health care needs, said state Rep. Ethan Manning, a Republican. GOP Gov. Eric Holcomb last week signed a bill Manning sponsored that relaxes some nurse education requirements.
There was a nurse shortage in Indiana before COVID-19 hit, Manning pointed out. “The pandemic, of course, has only made it worse. So it was time to take some action.”
The new law drops limits on how fast two- and four-year nursing programs can grow, allows nursing schools to replace some required clinical hours with simulation hours—that’s training using mannequins, technology and role-playing—and allows two-year programs to hire more part-time faculty.
A Kentucky bill, also Republican-sponsored, would lift limits on program growth and loosen the degree credentials required of nursing school faculty. Both the Kentucky and Indiana measures also would relax some nurse licensing rules.
Meanwhile, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, has approved a budget that sets aside $15 million in grants that nursing programs can use to expand enrollments and $30 million to endow nursing faculty positions.
Washington state’s Democratic-controlled legislature has approved funds to expand public nursing programs by about 200 seats (about a 10% increase, according to the Washington State Hospital Association), improve simulation training and create a student loan assistance program for nursing school faculty.
“This year in particular, I have never had more impassioned pleas for nursing workforce [policies] from nursing educators or from hospitals,” said Washington state Rep. Vandana Slatter, a Democrat who chairs the House College and Workforce Development Committee and sponsored the student loan assistance bill.
Slatter, a pharmacist, said she has heard from nurses who broke down into tears over the phone or called during the only 10-minute break they’d had for hours. “It broke my heart as a health care professional,” she said.
Indiana’s Manning this year also proposed a student loan relief fund for nurses and other types of providers who work in short-staffed areas of the state, among other criteria, but it went nowhere. Some of his colleagues were leery of creating a new government program, he said, and lawmakers and advocacy groups also disagreed over how to pay for it.
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