SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia nurses are working to find ways to keep nurses in the state. There’s a nursing shortage, particularly at the bedside and faculty positions, according to the Future of Nursing WV coalition.
“Nurses are retiring finally. When the economy was bad, they worked longer than maybe they would have and now they’re retiring, so we need more nurses,” said Aila Accad, executive director of Future of Nursing WV.
The coalition held a workforce summit at the Technology Park in South Charleston Friday to discuss the state of nursing in West Virginia. Topics included recruitment, retention and education pipeline programs.
Accad said not only are they having issues retaining nurses, but there is also a problem with attracting more people to the nursing profession. She said there are so many different avenues in nursing a person can take.
“You can literally do almost anything in nursing,” Accad said. “Some people say to me ‘oh, I hate blood.’ Well, I didn’t work in a hospital from the time I graduated. You don’t have to be in that end. I was doing public and community health nursing.”
The coalition, Accad said, has been encouraging volunteer nurses to go into schools to talk with students interested in nursing. She said the benefits of having that face-to-face interaction is priceless.
“What we learned from a survey is that most student nurses became nurses because they met a nurse that they admired and valued their role, so we thought putting more nurses in front of students earlier would get them excited about nursing.” Accad said.
Student nurses need to make sure they take the right classes, Accad said.
“Sometimes we have a lot of people that want to be nurses, but they’re not prepared to be nurses. They have to take the sciences and math in middle/high school so that they’re prepared to enter nursing school and they we have to keep that pipeline to fill the positions,” she said.
Accad said the goal of Friday’s summit was to come up with a few ideas to attract nurses to West Virginia.
For more information about the Future of Nursing West Virginia coalition, CLICK HERE.