Last year, nursing schools in Tennessee turned away twenty-three hundred applicants – not because the prospective students weren’t qualified, but because there weren’t enough teachers. The Tennessee Center for Nursing hopes to reverse that trend with a new scholarship that will send nurses in the field back to school.
Ann Duncan directs the Center for Nursing. She says enticing RN’s to return for a master’s or doctoral degree is the state’s greatest hope for avoiding the projected shortfall of 35-thousand nurses in Tennessee by 2020.
“If that shortage comes about it means we will be able to meet only 52- percent of the demand for RN’s. And within the next four years, here’s what we need in the way of faculty. We have to replace approximately 119 faculty just due to those who are expected to retire out.”
Duncan says the next step now is to raise 1.4-million dollars from private sources by next July. That’s when the first scholarship will be awarded. The amount of the new nursing scholarship will be determined later this summer.
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