Mississippi Short More Than 1000 Nurses

UMC Simulation Director Jan Cooper operates infant simulator.

Statewide Mississippi faces a nursing shortage of more than 1200 nurses. In today's health report--what that shortage means to health care in MS, and how to turn it around. MPB's Stephen Koranda reports.

Mississippi's nursing shortage can have a real impact on patient outcomes, says Janet Harris, Chief Nursing Executive officer at the University of MS Medical Center.

“Nurses save lives every day. That’s really the bottom line. Nurses are the people that are front and center when those incremental changes happen with patients and they pick up on those changes.”

Harris says the demands, and attractive offers from other industries cause around 1 in 3 nurses leave the field before their third year.

“They’ll go to a place where they don’t have to work as hard, to a daytime Monday through Friday job where they have more resources perhaps available to them. It’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get into a negative spiral with high work load, high stress and it just makes it that much worse.”

To improve the situation, they need to attract more students like 21 year old Brandi Purvis. She's just leaving a class at UMC studying pediatrics. She's currently working in healthcare as a pharmacist.

“I came to realize I wanted more patient interaction. I wanted to be in the room with the patient helping take care of them and doing things for them. So I switched over and decided to do nursing instead.”

At nursing schools throughout the state, they're trying to better prepare students like Brandi to keep them in the field after graduation. In a basement lab at UMC, Simulation Director Jan Cooper is punching buttons on a computer screen, standing next to what looks like a life size child's doll.
(Nat sound)

Cooper bunches a few buttons and the infant simulator comes to life.

“What we try in here to do is replicate the clinical environment as much as we possibly can so that students have that opportunity to get somewhat familiar with professional behaviors before they go out there into the real world.”

A few minutes later the situation gets a little better for the simulated baby. It's now thrashing around and crying, but at least it's breathing. (nat sound) In the lab there are simulators of every age group and condition, including a mother who gives birth. Cooper hopes presenting students with more lifelike, and sometimes stressful situations, will help get them ready.

“Because a lot of the frustration is you graduate one day and you’re a nurse, but there’s still so much that you have to learn. So if there’s anything that we can do up front before they get into that experience, it’s just better all the way around.”

But the state also faces a shortage of people like cooper, who educate nursing students. Many of them are at retirement age. Libby Mahaffey, dean of nursing at Hinds Community College, says they need to attract students and get them advanced degrees.

“Keeping that pipeline open so that we’re not only bringing students into sour generic programs to help them become nurses, but keeping them on that track to finish their master’s degree and their PhD in nursing so thay can also teach in these programs in the future.”

Even with the challenges she'll face, nursing student Brandi Purvis has a positive outlook on her future career.

“I know it’s going to be difficult, but for all the difficulties, they’re going to be the good stuff too. You’re going to have the patients you lose, but then you’re going to have the patients you that help get better and see and grow, and I think that has a lot to do with helping you stay in. It’s just knowing that years later you’re still going to be able to see the good that you’re done.”

Statewide nearly 1 in 10 nursing positions are vacant.