During her July 16 visit to Binghamton University, Sen. Hillary Clinton hailed the Decker School of Nursing as being at the forefront of rural health and nursing education in the United States, warning that if other programs do not follow their lead, the country could soon face a grave nursing shortage.
Students at Decker ‘ which boasts the only doctoral program in rural health in the nation ‘ performed a lab simulation for Clinton in the Innovative Practice Center with robotic dummies, including SimWoman and SimBaby. Students showed the senator how the robots are used to practice patient care and even showed her how to check the ‘baby’s’ heartbeat.
Decker, Clinton said, was ‘creating the mold for others to follow’ in terms of education designed to specialize in rural health. A shortage of nurses in rural areas, like New York’s Southern Tier, has been compounded by a draw to urban centers.
‘Nursing is key to the quality of health care,’ Clinton said at a press conference after her tour of the Decker facilities. ‘We may be facing a nursing shortage today, but we are setting ourselves up for a nursing crisis if we don’t address this issue now.’
Clinton’s visit ‘ which came just a month after she reintroduced legislation that would promote nursing education in rural areas and augment the faculty at nursing schools ‘ focused not only on New York State’s health care needs, but also on a growing national crisis.
As she toured the facility, the senator also spoke with faculty about the challenges facing the program and others like it around the country. An acute shortage of facilities and educators, she said, is being compounded by the difficulty of acquiring the necessary technology to teach nursing and offering competitive salaries. For example, a SimWoman, the instructional dummy used in the simulation, costs $60,000 before computerization.
‘We experience [the shortage] just as schools across the country do,’ said Mary Anne Condon, the associate dean for undergraduate programs. ‘We try to grow our own faculty ‘ and support our students getting through [the program] quicker.’
The senator cited Decker’s acceptance rate ‘ 40 out 1,500 applicants are accepted ‘ as exemplary and of ‘Ivy League’ stature, but noted that qualified applicants were being denied access because of the teaching shortage. The average age of a nursing faculty member in the United States, Clinton said, is 54, making the staffing problem a growing and looming trial.