The U.S. has a shortage of nurses. That shortage is projected to increase in the coming years.
Several Northwest colleges and universities are in the business of training nurses. Washington State, Gonzaga, Eastern Washington and Spokane Colleges offer a variety of degrees. This week, Whitworth jumped into the fray, announcing a new bachelor’s degree program that will begin in the fall of 2027.
When Linfield University School of Nursing Dean Paul Smith studied nursing at a college in Alabama, he had a mix of book learning and work in clinical settings, such as hospitals.
Years later, as the head of his northwest Oregon college nursing program, he says technology plays a more prominent role.
"One of the biggest changes I've seen in nursing education is the ability to work in simulation," Smith said.
Simulation involves high tech manikins that can be programmed for a variety of scenarios. Sometimes the manikins provide immediate feedback to the people working with it.
"This allows students a really safe space that where if they do make an error or something happens it's not going to cause harm to an individual. And we're able to give students the same learning opportunities that they may or may not get in a clinical site in a hospital organization."
Smith says nursing schools are also dabbling in virtual reality to let students practice their skills.
"The Oregon State Board of Nursing allows schools of nursing in our state to do up to 50% of their clinical hours in simulated experiences," he said. "I was just in a meeting with students the other day and they were talking about how much they love these simulated experiences because it gives them an opportunity to go in work on a situation and then debrief with their colleagues and a faculty about this and what they just learned."
Smith says learning in low-stress situations helps students develop their skills so that when the heat’s on in a real clinical setting, they’ll be ready. He says nursing education is a combination of teaching the hard skills of which techniques to employ when and the soft skills of how to relate to patients.
"We're not just teaching these graduates about just the skills and task about how do you go in to a high stress environment and you're able to process that where you know you might go into a hospital situation and your patient has a cardiac arrest and has a poor outcome, how do you process this and have the skills to be able to kind of internalize that for the lack of better words to continue moving on and providing care for your other patients," he said.
"It is really about advocacy and it's really about working with not only an individual patient but a family or a community which we look at."
Smith says nursing education is also about teaching students that it’s a difficult, stressful profession.
"We do a good job, I feel like, here at our university of really being honest with students about what the expectations are going to look like once they transition into practice so that they do know not only you know are we supporting them while they're students we also support many of our graduates once they're out of the program like feel free to call back and talk," he said.
"I've met with some students who are like I don't think I can do nursing and I'm like yes you can let's have lunch or let's go find a coffee shop and talk and sometimes it's just that ability to kind of help them understand you've got the skills and the knowledge and the abilities to move forward."
