BY AMY MILSHTEIN BECOMING A NURSE WAS A DREAM for Cesa Summer. At 46 years old, she was excited to be heading down a proven career path that promised variety, personal fulfillment and finally some financial stability. “I got tired of being poor,” she says with a laugh. Though she was highly motivated, Summer’s dream nearly derailed at the last minute. It wasn’t failing grades, illness or outside pressures that put her graduation from Portland Community College’s rigorous two-year nursing program in jeopardy. The threat to Summer’s diploma was coming from inside the house. In April 2023, shortly before Summer was set to graduate, Lisa Sanchez-Navarro—the director of Portland Community College’s ⁄Spotlight⁄ Nursing School Blues The nursing-educator shortage is an old story with growing consequences. Can Oregon’s colleges and lawmakers finally solve the problem? program — resigned her position. That started the clock ticking: Administrators had just 15 days to find a new director and have them approved by the Oregon State Board of Nursing (OSBN) — or shutter the program. After a lot of shuffling and searching, and an extra 15-day extension, PCC administrators hired Cynthia Backer as interim program Dean of Nursing. With an approved director in place, Summer and her cohort of new nurses could get their diplomas and start their nursing careers. “The Oregon State Board of Nursing works closely with all of the colleges,” says Janeen Hull, PCC’s dean of academic & career pathways for healthcare & emergency professions. “They would never leave students hanging.” Yet nursing students, nursing educators, hospitals and ultimately everyone seeking health care in Oregon are all in danger of being left hanging. Nurses are in desperately short supply, but fully qualified nurse educators are really hard to find. In fact, though her résumé is long, even Backer does not meet the full qualifications set by OSBN to become a permanent hire. Finding a permanent candidate to meet those full standards will be challenging. “The pool of qualified nurses who want to work in education is small,” Hull admits. The nursing shortage, nursing-educator shortage and connection between the two is old news. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) has been highlighting the issue for over two decades, according to an article in American Nurse. Written by Susan Bakewell-Sachs, OHSU School of Nursing dean, along with two other contributors, the article calls the problem behind the nurse-faculty shortage a “matter of great and growing concern.” A sticky web of interconnected issues — burnout, lack of clinical and lab space, uncompetitive pay for nurse educators, and a fair dose of institutional misogyny—drives this crisis. The COVID pandemic accelerated the pace. And while this is a nationwide problem, Oregon has been hit particularly hard. The state produces the third-fewest nursing school graduates per capita as compared to the rest of the country, according to a study by the Oregon Longitudinal Data Collaborative (OLDC). Statewide, stakeholders hunt for coordinated solutions, but the prognosis is unknown. The nursing and nursing-educator crisis has festered for a long time. Can this finally be the moment of change? IT IS NOT THAT PEOPLE DO NOT WANT to become nurses. Just like Summer, plenty of good candidates dream of starting down this path. For this year’s fall class, Portland Community College alone had 400 well-qualified applicants to their program, according to Hull. The program, however, could only accommodate 32 of them — that is, 8% of total applicants. Numbers across the state are a little better, but not much. The OLDC study found that 6,800 qualified people applied to programs in 2020, but only 23% were accepted. On the national level, there were 91,038 qualified nursing applications left on the table in 2021. The fact that most registered nursing programs in Oregon have enough qualified applications and regional jobs to double Recent nursing- program graduate Cesa Summer PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN 22
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