THE WOODLANDS, Texas — In April 2022, a published nursing workforce analysis found that the total supply of registered nurses decreased by more than 100,000 from 2020 to 2021. It's the largest drop observed over the past four decades.
To help with the shortage, Sam Houston State University's School of Nursing has received a grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to address the shortages in the state's nursing pipeline.
"The nursing shortage in Texas is acute. It’s the second largest nursing shortage in the nation, and the context for it is even more important," explained Dr. Devon Berry, Director of the SHSU School of Nursing. "The latest projection is we will be 800,000 nurses short in the United States by 2027."
The school is hoping to change that statistic by building their capacity to meet the needs of Texas hospitals.
"Texas needs more nurses and of course when that’s the case they turn to their public institutions to step up and help fill the gap and we need clinical placements and we need faculty so we wrote a grant that purposed that we would do a lot of different things working with one of the leaders of simulation technology called Avkin, to take their skills and up them," described Dr. Berry.
This is a chance for Texans to make a positive impact in the health care industry.
"Texas this biennium has an opportunity to take some of the resources that are there and to begin to channel them towards solutions for this nursing shortage. Its gonna have to happen in education because that’s the pipeline if we need to have more nurses we have to educate more nurses," explained Dr. Berry. "That's not the only approach, but that’s the largest most effective approach and as it stands the last report that came out a few months ago every school of nursing in the United States would have to triple its graduates for three years in order to bridge the chasm we have with the shortage."