SC has ‘critical’ need for nurses. Here’s what a Beaufort Co. program is doing about it
A Beaufort County nursing scholarship has been created with the hopes of attracting nurses to the area amid a shortage that the American Nurses Association is calling a national crisis.
The South Carolina Nurse Retention Scholarship will provide four candidates with $6,000 annually to help pay off student loans and other expenses for four years while they work in Beaufort County.
In a Sept. 1 letter to the U.S. Department of Health’s secretary Xavier Becerra, the American Nurses Association said the staffing shortage is dire and endangers the quality of patient care.
While the pandemic has amplified the shortage and issues like burnout, these workforce challenges aren’t new. The shortage “began to hit, and hit hard” in the 1990s, according to Joy Deupree, an advanced practice nurse, professor and associate dean at the University of South Carolina’s College of Nursing.
“It was at a time when women had traditionally always been nurses or teachers, and they saw they could go down a different direction,” Deupree said. “We got to a point where we were above water for a while, and it wasn’t as critical as it is now.”
Jean Joelle, a nurse practitioner and writer for Nurse Journal, an online resource for nurses, said the shortage stems from population increases and baby boomers retiring. The shortages she experienced when she started in 2006, she said, are “nothing like” what nurses deal with today.
“I worked in the pediatric emergency room, and even before COVID-19, we were seeing over 200 patients daily,” Joelle said.
She first noticed the shortage when hospitals began splitting nurses into rotating teams and creating specialty fellowships that hired nurses fresh out of school.
“In the past, new nurses were never hired into these specialty floors without 1-2 years of experience,” Joelle said.
A state-by-state breakdown of the shortage based on data from the Bureau of Health workforce shows South Carolina has the lowest ratio of nurses to the population at 7.89 per every 1,000 people.
S.C. Nurse Retention Scholarship
Nursing students graduate with an average $22,000 in loans, according to a press release from the new scholarship program. Research shows that tuition has tripled over the last 20 years.
In South Carolina, the press release said, nurses are paid $6,000 less than other states.
“We got to talking, and it made more and more sense that there should be a program that attracts and retains nursing talent here,” said Bob Elliot, co-founder for the program.
The first four candidates have already been selected, according to Elliot, because of a grant from the Community Foundation of the Lowcountry. By 2022, Elliot said, the program hopes to be able to support 10 more nurses.
Community efforts like this are a tribute to the value of nurses who were the “substitute families” for people hospitalized by COVID-19, Deupree said.
“During the pandemic, when families could not come in, it put an additional ... mental strain on them,” Deupree said. “They have been just so badly impacted by this.”
This story was originally published September 19, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
