Nursing School Programs

You’ve picked a great time to explore a career in nursing, because you’ve never been needed more! These days, many hospitals are reporting that 10 percent or more of their budgeted positions for registered nurses are vacant. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for nurses is expected to grow much faster than other careers - at least 27 percent by the year 2014.

As the baby boomer population ages and their health care needs increase, as nurses retire faster than new ones come into the field - the demand for registered nurses only gets stronger.

Because of the high demand, registered nurses are now able to command a very respectable salary. According to Salary.Com, the median salary for a registered nurse in the United States is currently $59,061.

What does this mean for you? It means that with a degree as a Registered Nurse, you can earn a great salary and you have endless opportunities for employment in a wide variety of settings. You can work with children, with the elderly, in hospitals, in doctor’s offices, for the federal government, in resorts, on cruise ships, in the criminal justice system, in clinics, in schools, and in so many other places we can’t list them all. Because nurses are needed around the clock, you can pick what shifts you want to work, and if you need extra money you can work all of the overtime that you can handle.
That’s the good news. What’s the bad news?

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As waiting lists at traditional nursing schools get longer and longer, many people who already have bachelor’s degrees are considering an increasingly popular alternative: accelerated nursing degrees.If you already have a Bachelor’s Degree in an unrelated field, you can apply to a school which offers an accelerated BSN in nursing.  These programs typically take about a year to a year and a half to complete. It sounds perfect, right? There are a few things to think about before you commit to an accelerated bachelor’s of science in nursing.Advantages: You will graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree, which means you will command a higher salary than you would with a two year Associate’s Degree in Nursing program. And you will get this degree in less time than it would take you to get an ASN degree. In both cases you are an RN (once you pass the NCLEX) but nurses with Bachelor of Science degrees tend to earn a higher hourly wage. Disadvantage: accelerated degrees are intensive programs and you will not be able to do anything else while you are attending school. You will not be able to work, and you will have to spend all of your spare time studying. Most accelerated degree programs will not even accept you unless you give a signed commitment that you will not work while going to school. You will have massive amounts of science and math related memorization and frequent tests and clinicals. Also, these nursing programs are typically quite expensive; $30,000 to $50,000 tuition is not unusual at all. However, if the alternative to such a program means waiting many years to get into a typical nursing school, you may want to give it some serious consideration and at least talk to the admissions counselors at some schools that offer these types of accelerated nursing degrees. 

There are a lot of searches on the internet for the term “Online LPN school”. Unfortunately - or maybe fortunately - there is no such thing.

Online nursing programs are geared towards Licensed Practical Nurses who have already gone through a year of school, done clinicals, interacted with patients under the supervision and direction of a registered nurse, etc. etc. There are things that a nurse needs to learn that can not be learned online.

There are LPN to RN degrees online, LPN to Bachelor of Science in Nursing Degrees online, and many other degrees that a nurse can get - once he or she has gotten that all important Licensed Practical Nursign degree first.

When you’re applying to nursing school, you can’t control how many other applicants are applying for the same slot - and these days, that number will be HIGH. You will be facing some stiff competition if you are applying to a community college or traditional four-year degree program.

However, here are two things that you can do to make yourself more attractive to a nursing school.

1.) Get some health-care experience before you apply. One way to do this is to volunteer at a local nursing home or hospital. Make sure you do this for at LEAST a few months before you apply to nursing school. This shows that you are comfortable working in a healthcare environment and you have a genuine interest in caring for others. Or, you can get a job as a certified nurse’s aide. To do this, you need to take a short course - if you look online for a CNA course in your area you can usually find a course that takes just a couple of weekends to complete. Then, you will take a test on the CNA skills that you’ve learned, undergo a criminal background check - and voila, you can work as a CNA! The pay is not high, but there is very high demand.  Again, this shows the nursing school admissions counselor that you are serious about a healthcare career.

2.) What is your GPA? If there are any pre-requisite courses that you’ve taken and did not do well in - it would be worth your while to retake those classes at a local community college and improve your GPA. Again, there is a lot of competition to get into nursing school these days.  If you can retake a class and this time participate in study groups, ask your school for help with tutoring (often offered free to students), find study groups online…boosting your GPA will boost your chances of acceptance.

Parade Magazine recently discussed the nursing shortage, citing the very same reason that I’ve frequently mentioned here on this site: not enough nursing teachers. Which means not enough nursing classes. Which means not enough students can graduate from nursing school to replace all of those registered nurses who are leaving the field.

Nationally, the article says, 42,866 qualified applicants were turned away from nursing school programs last year. That is very unfortunate; think how much better off patients everywhere would be if all of those qualified, eager nursing school applicants had been accepted. Eventually, of course, some of those applicants are going to get discouraged and give up and seek other fields.

Before they do, of course, I would suggest that they explore some alternative methods of getting past the nursing school waiting lists.

Pensacola Junior College has received a grant from several partners and is expanding a number of its programs. They will be accepting more paramedic to RN students ( a two-year associate’s degree program.)

Recently many paramedic students suffered a big letdown when Florida’s Board of Nursing decided that they were not going to accept the Excelsior online Paramedic to RN program  - even while some students were halfway or all the way through the program.  However, Pensacola Junior College is just one of many community colleges in the State of Florida which offer state accredited paramedic to Rn programs - so there’s no reason to give up.

And here’s an exciting option that we haven’t come across before: CNA to LPN! Apparently it’s a brand new program, and 60 students will be enrolled. Check out the information at the Florida Center for Nursing Webpage, which also has information about other Florida schools which have recently received various nursing grants.

The nursing shortage in some ways benefits nurses, because it means that nurses are highly sought after by employers,  but it can be hugely stressful for them as well.

When hospitals can’t hire enough nurses, the nurses that they do have end up working a lot of overtime, which is physically exhausting. Who do you want to care for you - an exhausted stressed-out nurse or a well-rested nurse?

A study by the American Organization of Nurse Executives and Nurseweek Publishing shows that 93 percent of nurses surveyed feel that the lack of time that they are able to spend with patients is a major problem, and that this problem is caused by the nursing shortage.

Hopefully our legislature will start providing more funding to hire nursing teachers. If nursing teachers were better paid, more nurses would choose to be teachers, which would mean nursing schools could finally start serving enough students to address the nursing shortage.

Once you graduate from nursing school you will have a wide variety of places to look for nursing jobs. Where do most nurses end up working after graduation?

According to a survey by the Department of Health and Human Services, hospitals are by far the biggest employers of nurses. 56.2 percent of nurses work at hospitals. Next comes community and public health settings (such as schools) at 14.9 percent. After that comes ambulatory care settings, which includes physician’s practices, nurse-based practices, and health maintenance organizations. 11.5 percent of nurses work in these settings. Only 2.6 percent of nurses were employed in nursing education - which helps explain the nursing shortage.

Here, according to the survey, are some of the other places that nurses are employed: Federal administrative agencies, state boards of nursing, health associations, health planning agencies, prisons and jails, insurance companies, and other types of employment such as pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies.

It’s almost the end of January 2008, so if you are thinking of applying to nursing school for the fall semester of 2009, now’s the time. Some schools start nursing classes several times throughout the year; traditional schools start in the fall.

Here’s what you need to do:

Get together your list of all of the nursing schools that you are interested in applying to.

Contact each one and find out the application deadline for this year, and what type of entrance exam they have.

Find out what book they recommend to study for the exam, get it, and study study study until you are comfortable with it. Take a few sample tests, and time yourself - give yourself as much time as the nursing school will give you.

Order your transcripts from high school, previous college, etc. They can take several weeks to arrive, so order NOW - and make sure that you get a sealed official copy sent to the school that you are applying to.

Apply to multiple schools to better your chances of getting in.

Most people these days realize that there is a severe nursing shortage and that it’s only going to get worse, but not everyone realizes why this is so.

Here are five reasons why hospitals, doctor’s offices, schools, clinics, and other employers all across America, in small towns and big cities, are scrambling to find nurses:

1.) Nursing teachers aren’t paid well enough. This is one of the main causes of the nursing shortage. It’s hard to attract nurses into teaching positions because private employers such as hospitals and clinics pay much better. So colleges turn away many, many qualified nursing school candidates every year because they just don’t have enough nursing teachers.

2.) Nursing teachers are aging out and retiring. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, nursing school professors average age is 52 years. And when they retire, there will be even less nursing teachers, unless steps are taken to offer a considerably better salary.

3.) An aging baby boomer population creates a need for more nurses. As people age they obviously develop more health-care issues and need more healthcare assistance.

4.) Fairly high turnover in the nursing profession. Every year, a significant percentage of nurses leave the profession that they thought they’d love. The job is stressful, nurses are in constant fear of losing their licenses, and many states don’t have mandatory nurse-patient ratios which protect both the nurse and the patient.

5.) An aging nursing population. The present average age of registered nurses is 43.3 percent, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

A professor at the University of Central Florida Health Services Administration just did a study which shows that hospitals with higher RN staffing levels have lower patient mortality and less post-operative complications than hospitals with lower nurse to patiant ratios.

Go figure, eh?

Florida, unfortunately, is not one of those states that has a maximum nurse-patient ratio, unlike California.