According to the US Health Resources and Services Administration, South Carolina is projected to have a shortage of registered nurses by 2030. The shortage is expected to be more significant than in most other states, possibly topping 10,000 nurses.
Clemson University’s School of Nursing and the Greenville Health System (GHS) recently collaborated on a plan to address that shortage in the state of South Carolina through the opening of the Clemson University Nursing building. The building is an education and research facility that houses an expansion of Clemson’s baccalaureate nursing program at GHS, which opened in August.
Clemson’s new building allowed the School of Nursing to increase its first-year enrollment from 64 in fall 2015 to 173 in fall 2018. The university expects to increase total enrollment in the baccalaureate program to top 700 by 2021.
Kathleen Valentine, director of Clemson’s School of Nursing, tells Clemson.world, “The collaboration will not only expand our enrollment, but will also integrate teaching and clinical practice in innovative ways that will positively impact nursing education and patient outcomes.”
Nursing students at Clemson take their general education and nursing foundation courses on the main campus during their freshman and sophomore years. Then they are placed into one of two cohorts allowing students to complete their nursing courses in Greenville under the guidance of Clemson faculty and complete their clinical rotations at a GHS campus, or take their junior and senior nursing courses on Clemson’s main campus and complete their clinical rotations at health systems across the state, including GHS.
To learn more about Clemson Nursing’s partnership with Greenville Health System to open a new education and research facility, visit here.
The building will enable Clemson and GHS to address the critical shortage of nurses in the state, and has already allowed Clemson to increase the size of its freshman nursing class. Clemson’s School of Nursing usually admits a class of 64 freshman each fall, but started this year with a class of 173 freshman.
South Carolina has been one of the states most affected by the shortage of nurses. However, Clemson’s Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program has seen significant growth in applications over the last ten years. In anticipation of the new building, the university has been bumping up nursing class sizes for two years. Total enrollment in the nursing program will increase from 256 in the fall of 2015 to 704 students as it reaches maximum capacity (when all four classes max out at 176 students).
To learn more about Clemson University’s partnership with Greenville Health System to open a new $31.5 million nursing building to help alleviate the nursing shortage, visit here.
With the new larger four-story building, Clemson and GHS will be able to expand their bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) degree program from 352 to 800 students over the next six years, doubling the number of undergraduate nursing students they can educate and place into clinical settings. The goal of the new building and increased student population is to ease the state’s nursing shortage.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) suggests that the nursing shortage is growing steadily as baby boomers retire and not enough nurses graduate to replace them. Demand for BSN-educated nurses is also expected to rise with over one million nursing job openings predicted by 2022. Nursing shortages, especially at hospitals, are a critical problem that leads to higher risk of errors and poor quality of care when nursing units are short-staffed. Hospitals are also receiving increasingly complex patients, strengthening the demand for nurses who hold bachelor’s degrees.
GHS and Clemson expect their collective space to become a hub of academic collaboration with space for Clemson researchers and a hospital-like environment with virtual reality simulators and high-fidelity human patient simulators. Classrooms, offices, simulation labs, and collaborative spaces will all be housed in the new building where medical and nursing students can be trained to work together.
