Program eases nurse shortage

By Travis Ball
The Collegian

While many Fresno State students may have spent summer vacation with school being the furthest thing from their minds, others continued going to class.

In May, 60 Fresno State graduate students began a master’s program in nursing, which is designed to take only 36 months and 98 units of coursework to complete.

The Department of Nursing at Fresno State developed this accelerated entry-level masters (ELM) program in response to the nursing shortage in the Central Valley and the state of California. The ELM program was open to any student with a bachelor’s degree that completed eight required nursing prerequisites.

“This is a way that people that are not nurses that are making a career change can get in, and at the end of this get a master’s degree,” said Cricket Barakzai, the former graduate coordinator for the Department of Nursing who directed the ELM program. The students are doing all regular nursing courses and the master’s courses at an accelerated rate. Students are in session fall, spring and summer until the program is complete.

Of the 60 students who were admitted to the ELM nursing program, only three are no longer enrolled.

According to Barakzai, now the interim director for Fresno State’s Central California Center for Excellence in Nursing, the program is right on track. “We realize there was going to be some attrition, life happens,” she said. “We realized we were going to lose a few.”

The 57 students who remain make up a very diverse ELM program. The opportunity to enter the nursing program with any type of bachelor’s degree allowed students with different backgrounds to apply.

Cadie Ayers, who received her bachelor’s degree in international business from Fresno State in 2005, was in San Jose working in sales before she entered the ELM nursing program. “I was doing well and making good money, which right now I really miss,” Ayers said. Ayers said her job was stressful and she believed this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “What really got me to do it was I wanted to help people,” she said. “I got tired of everything being about money.”

When the ELM program began in May students were doing two semesters of nursing in the 12 weeks of summer vacation other students had. “This is a very rigorous program,” Barakzai said. “It was very, very tough at first.” But now that the students are back on a normal schedule this fall semester, she said things are a little quieter. The fact that some of the students had been out of school for as long as 10 or 15 years made things even harder.

Amy Mason graduated from Fresno State in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in nutrition. Now in the ELM program, Mason has found that her nutrition background is helpful as a nursing student. “I thought to myself I was crazy for leaving my job,” Mason said. “So far I’ve enjoyed what I’ve been doing. I don’t feel like a fish out of water.”

The ELM nursing program will end in May 2009 when the students will graduate with a clinical nurse specialist degree with a focus in nurse education. “This is a one-time thing,” Barakzai said. “We’re not doing it again that we know of.” She hopes that some graduates will begin working as clinical faculty as well as some as practicing nurses. Because faculty, Barakzai said, is the true source of the nursing shortage.

“The main reason we have a nursing shortage in the United States is we don’t have a faculty to teach,” Barakzai said. In 2005 there were 30,000 people in the U.S. who couldn’t get into nursing programs because there wasn’t enough faculty to teach, she said. “As faculty we are all getting older, so it is only going to get worse as we retire.” Barakzai said there has been a lot of support for the ELM program.

Along with some faculty teaching year round and nurses stepping forward to teach labs, there has been excitement in the community and hospitals around the Valley have worked well with the students. “These are going to be the nursing leaders in a few years,” Barakzai said. “The average age of a nurse is about 47, most nurses retire by the time they are 55. It’s hard work. We need to turn out some new leaders, so the rest of us can retire.”

In 2010 California will need 37,600 additional nurses, Barakzai said, and by 2020 it will need 116,000

. “Currently we graduate about 6,000 a year, so we would need to graduate at least 9,000 more a year to meet that demand,” she said. “You can see we are in bad shape nurse wise.”

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