WGU Sage Advice with Chris Bonnell
What is Western Governors University? This is the most common question that I receive. The simple answer is, WGU is an online, competency-based higher education institution that promises students a high-quality, low-cost education. But there is so much more to the WGU story. My name is Chris Bonnell and I am the host of Sage Advice, a new podcast from Western Governors University. I’ve spent the past eight years sharing this story with legislators and community leaders across the country. And now, through the Sage Advice podcast, I share it with you. I’m sitting down for conversations with my esteemed colleagues at Western Governors University and experts across the industry. Together, we will share the stories of who WGU was designed to serve, how we are making education work for everyone, and why we proudly claim to be the most student-centric university in the world. Follow us wherever you get your content so you don’t miss a single episode, and stay tuned for Sage Advice from WGU.
WGU Sage Advice with Chris Bonnell
How WGU is Changing the Face of Nursing Education with Kim Kelly-Cortez
In the first episode of Season 2 of WGU Sage Advice, host Emma Salomon is joined by Dr. Kim Kelly-Cortez, Senior Associate Dean and Director of Undergraduate Programs at Western Governors University (WGU) and the Vice President of Nursing for the Leavitt School of Health, to discuss the future of nursing education and the innovative approaches being taken to prepare the next generation of nurses.
Join them as they:
- Delve into Kim’s journey into nursing
- Discuss the challenges in nursing education
- Shine a light on WGU's pre-licensure program for nursing
- Talk about the current nursing shortage
With a background in education and a passion for healthcare, Kim has played a crucial role in driving the nursing faculty at WGU into the 21st century. She has helped expand enrollment, improve NCLEX scores, and increase student satisfaction.
If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.
Sage Advice is brought to you by Western Governors University. To learn more about WGU and how it's pioneering a new path in higher education, visit https://www.wgu.edu/impact
There are two key factors I would want every legislator to know is that it requires two things to create the next generation of nursing. It requires clinical placements during the student's learning journey and it requires educators to actually teach the next generation of nursing.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Sage Advice, the podcast where the future of higher education is not just discussed, it's crafted. Every episode, we dive deep into the transformative world of learning, bringing you conversations with the pioneers and policymakers who are reshaping education today, joining you from the innovative halls of Western Governors University. I'm your host, chris Bonnell. Hey Sage Advice listeners, I hope that you will take the time to join my co-host, emma Solomon, and Kim Kelly Cortez, wgu's interim dean and chief nursing officer and VP of Nursing for the Levitt School of Health. Emma had to be an interesting conversation with KKC as we were exploring pre-licensure and the myriad of programs offered by the Levitt School of Health.
Speaker 3:Indeed, it was Chris. The Levitt School of Health is doing something very interesting in its pre-licensure programs. If you're not familiar with how one becomes a nurse, you will be by the end of this episode. Our school has developed ways to help working adults who juggle family and careers go into one of the most demanding professions and do it on their own time, and Kim's work has enabled our students to not only have lower barriers to entry into WGU, but she's also helped us drive up our NCLEX exam rates. And to those of you who aren't familiar with the NCLEX exam, that is the nationwide exam to determine if it's safe for you to become a nurse. So it was a terrific conversation with Kim, all about how one becomes a nurse, her story with NWGU, how she got started and even a little before that. And yeah, you'll be sure to learn a lot about the world of nursing and the challenges that they're facing now.
Speaker 2:And I'm really looking forward to hearing the conversation that you had with Kim Kelly Cortez and just appreciate you stepping in to fill the void while I've been away.
Speaker 3:Excited for you to listen.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Kim Kelly Cortez is WGU's interim dean and chief nursing officer and vice president of nursing for the Levitt School of Health. She's someone who's shepherded thousands of prospective nurses into a profession on which our families and economies depend. Naturally, it's vital that when nurses enter a fast-paced working environment, they're armed with all the tools they need not just to survive but to thrive. For these nurses to feel prepared in these roles, it's essential that their training facilities and education are all state of the art. In her many roles within WGU, kim has driven the nursing faculty into a 21st century level of functionality and competency, inacting fundamental change of the business and education models. It's thanks to her that WGU has expanded enrollment, helping many more prospective nurses enter the field, while simultaneously driving up NCLEX scores and student satisfaction.
Speaker 3:It's such a pleasure to have her with us. Welcome, kimberly. Hi. So good to be with you today. Hi. Thank you for joining us. So, kimberly, you, like many of WGU students, experienced a career change. Before you became interested in nursing, you worked at Chavez High School in the history department, where you were named teacher of the year. Can you tell us a bit about what inspired your love of history and then later about your transition into health care?
Speaker 1:It was really during my high school years, as I was going through, I had a history teacher and she was just amazing, choose, phenomenal. And she would just get in there and really tell you the stories, like really tell you the history, give you information about the people and the culture and society and the times, and I don't know what was happening in any of these locations that we might be visiting and during that I just kind of looked at that and said, wow, I really would love to do that. I want to be that person that gets you excited about learning, gets you excited about what you're doing and where you're going to move into. And so when I was kind of deciding, where do I want to go in life, where do I want to go to college? What do I want to major in it was funny I always came back to the same two things. It was either being a nurse or being a teacher. I was always helping somebody when they had a, as we would say back then, a boo boo or something happened on their leg. I wanted to be involved, to put the band-aid on and to be there. But then again, are you having a problem with your math homework? I want to help you with your times tables. I was always in both of those things, in both of those areas, but that particular teacher just kind of inspired me. I think teaching is really where I want to go.
Speaker 1:I love history and when I went to college that's what I pursued. So I pursued history and I pursued teaching. I really enjoyed it and did that for many years. All of the social studies, so history, government, economics, all of those things are kind of rolled into the social sciences at the high school level and so I really had the opportunity to teach all of those things. And then after that, as I was teaching and I was kind of moving through in that world, I was a teacher for many years. And then I went back to school and I became an assistant principal. And I was an assistant principal and at Cesar Chavez, when I worked at that particular institution it was an area that was very up and coming. It was a brand new school. When I went there it just opened. It was the first year it opened. It was the same year I was lucky enough to be nominated and winning teacher of the year for the Southeast region, which is where we were, where our district went and again, this was a very large school district.
Speaker 1:But during the time when I walked in the door at this new school I was teaching world geography that year and when I went into the room I realized I wasn't just teaching world geography to a regular old Knight graders that are just coming in and learning world geography. What we kind of had is this pod structure, this communities within schools is kind of what they call that. So each hallway, each thing had a different theme. Well turned out. Where I was at at F2 co time when I started, I was in an area where the students had her struggle getting through the ninth grade, getting through their courses. So all of us had the same group of students within that kind of community within that hallway and we really trying to help them achieve and to graduate and to move forward and get into the 10th grade.
Speaker 1:But when we opened we really didn't have all the resources that we thought we would have when we opened that school. Nothing like teaching geography without maps. But we walked in there and you kind of had a talk and kind of this thing and you've got to really become a teacher. I mean really got to be to sit there and think what can I do to help these Individuals learn, these students that have pretty much only lived in this one community and only seen this one way of life? How can I bring this alive to them? How can I bring culture alive, the people alive, not just the land masses and the mountains and the lakes, but also these? Why is this different in this country? Why do they approach things in a different way? Why do they have a different belief system? Then we have all of that really affects it. When you learn geography, it's not just where it is, but it's what people are like. And so in that, as a new educator, I have to explore all these ideas of bringing the music and the food and the clothing and the culture and bring it Alive to my students. And then we all got to work together in this kind of pod across all the disciplines and then Incorporate that into their English, and we're doing something in math. We really brought this in all together. So I think for me what was so exciting in that was not necessarily just getting an award. It was actually getting to flex my muscles as a new teacher, really learn all these teaching styles and these teaching modalities. Then have my students actually become successful. All of our students in our hall Ended up going on to the 10th grade and eventually there were other things that they all made it through, this repeat of the ninth grade and it kind of inspired me at that time to say, well, what's different and what are we looking at? So that was really kind of just the impetus of starting, kind of going into that teaching world.
Speaker 1:But then after that in those communities in a school as an administrator, I was ended up over a health professions whole and a health professions Community and all the students in that community all had a desire, basically raised their hand and said I would love to go In healthcare when I get done high school. I wanted to college and I want to go into healthcare. And always in the back of my mind I'd always had this what would it's like to be a nurse? I would love to be in healthcare. And as I was taking students through these different programs and we were bringing them in, how you can get your pharmacy tech license while you're in school, how do you work with the future health care association, also called hosa? How do we work with that? We had an early child care center even within our community where the students were bringing their kids If they had kids while they were at school that day but then also working through them through their health care, their development, their developmental needs, all of that kind of wrapped into the same cluster. So I have this group, this community within a school is kind of looking at healthcare.
Speaker 1:I'd always had kind of a desire to go into healthcare then because I was the administrator over health care, I always covered for the nurse. Then, as the administrator, you're going to the community and you always kind of look at okay, what are the social factors that are helping the student or preventing the student from being successful? Why are they not successful in this particular area? And when we were working through that, we kind of found that there were a lot of social and health factors that were affecting these students at home. So, as I said, many of my students already had children of their own. But then on that, many of my students were also helping to pay the bills, making sure the lights stayed on, helping their families pay the water bill, helping their families take care of the brothers and sisters that were coming up around them. Also, within that, a lot of the parents had these health disparities that you really only see in Certain communities. It seems to be amplified in this community by your zip code or where you are. Our lower income individuals I don't have the same access to healthcare really were Disproportionately impacted, and that impact was not only to them but their children and their families and the things that were going on.
Speaker 1:And as I moved in Education, I kept seeing this over and over again, this disparity and kind of this I don't want to say calling into health, and it was like, really, is there something more to do? I love being administrator, I love working in education, and then I started to really kind of think about the healthcare world. I think. One thing that was really interesting, though, in that kind of thinking about healthcare there was also another aspect, and people always asked me when made you go into Healthcare? What made you change from teaching to healthcare?
Speaker 1:So I had all of those pieces, but there was one other little piece to that is that I was a first generation Student to go to college. I was the first in my family to go to college and I went to a state school. But fortunately my family couldn't afford to send me to school they weren't able to pay for that. I had to take out loans and I had to Work while I went to school and do all those things. But as a first generation individual going to college, you don't really know about loans and you don't really know about finances and you don't really understand that burden of going to school and healthcare and finance. And when I went to school you were really encouraged, even out of state school, to take out the maximum At least back when I went to school, the maximum amount of money, not just for tuition, books and fees but for living expenses. So when I came out with my bachelor's of arts in history and my teaching license, I wasn't considerable, that considerable debt for school loan. And even though I'd become an assistant principal and I paid for my master's out of pocket, I did not incur any more debt, believe it or not.
Speaker 1:As an assistant principal working in the inner city school system, I went in the farthest school systems in the country.
Speaker 1:I literally could not afford to live on the salary I got paid and pay back my school loan.
Speaker 1:It was impossible.
Speaker 1:So as I was looking around and I was looking at these health disparities, I'd always had a desire to go into healthcare.
Speaker 1:I also knew healthcare was actually going to earn me a better living Than the living I was making in education, which is very sad to say that you have to leave one passion, even though it was another passion, because I literally couldn't afford to live at the salary I was making and I was looking to find a program that I was able to join and to do, to become a nurse and accelerated program, and that was really the final, final piece of that puzzle that said you need to go in this direction.
Speaker 1:So it was that calling. But I think, because of what we do at Western Governors and the way we value affordability and pathways and those passions, I think it's important to also pull out that financial aspect of not being able to make a true living in K-12 education, even though you're imparting knowledge on those generations, moving that forward, really setting the path for our future generations, regardless of where you're going. It's kind of interesting to know that I too had to take that leap and did end up in healthcare for that reason as well. That's something that could actually give me a living while I was also trying to do new and innovative things.
Speaker 3:It's heartbreaking to think about what limits us, especially first generation college students. I know that a lot of WG students come back to WGU because it is affordable and they are looking to change their career path so they can better the lives for their family. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your education journey to becoming a nurse and what it might look like if you had enrolled at WGU.
Speaker 1:Oh I would have loved to have had WGU as an option for me on my journey any of my journey Starting out with my degree just in history and working into K-12, but for healthcare I really had to look around here. I was a professional, I was an adult, I already had a master's degree in education and I really wanted to go into nursing and go into healthcare and really move into that lens. And when I did a lot of research back then, there were not a lot of opportunities for you except for to quit your job, go back to school, go back to school full time. In fact, the program that I was actually able to find to do required that it was an accelerated program. You did have to quit your job. You did also have to incur additional debt to be able to do that. Hence why doing it very quickly was very important to me and really trying to move through and get to that next step in my life, which for me I knew was nursing, Just trying to find the quickest way I could get there, really valuing all the education I'd already had up to this point and have those opportunities.
Speaker 1:That's something that WGU actually has. I mean, if I had had WGU I probably wouldn't have had to quit my job. I would have been able to do both of those things. I would have been able to get those prerequisite courses which WGU would have allowed me to take to move forward, to stay in the workforce while I became a part of another workforce, instead of having to leave one workforce while I explored this other workforce and this other option, and again it would have been considerably more affordable. I did again have to incur debt to make that transition. It's funny. I had to make a transition to try to get out of debt but incur more debt to actually make that a reality, and that's a lot that we have to do with. Wgu would have made that a much more affordable option because, again, it just know-alls, it's just something that keeps building.
Speaker 3:And so could you tell us about someone who'd become a nurse starting from scratch if they enrolled at WGU through our pre-licensure program?
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm very excited about our pre-licensure program here at WGU. For a student to get enrolled, really, it's very simple. We tried to remove every barrier possible to ensure we were able to open up our program to the majority of students around the nation, especially in the states that we're currently in. So by doing that, they really just have to reach out to the enrollment counselor. We do not require any prerequisite courses. There's nothing they have to take to get in. As far as previous college coursework, the only thing they do have to do is they do have to take an entrance exam. So the students do have to go in and take one of the entrance exams that we have in some key areas, and those include things like English, grammar, reading, math, just some of those very basic elements.
Speaker 1:And the reasoning for that, the reasoning for even having that, is just to ensure that you have just the basic knowledge you need to be able to come in and be successful.
Speaker 1:We're going to teach you all the heavy math, all the heavy science, all the heavy everything else.
Speaker 1:This really is just a basic, foundational knowledge that you would get in high school, just to ensure you have that to be able to come in. And if you don't, then we'll be able to help guide you to how to get that foundational knowledge so that you'll be able to come in and be successful. From then you just apply, you come in and you take all your courses with us in the pre-nursing portion of the program and then move to the nursing portion of the program. You do not have to reapply to go from one to the other. You come in, you start your general education credits, you get all of that stuff that you need and you progress into the nursing portion of the program. So as long as you're able to complete the courses, you're able to continue to move. So that's different than many other programs where you do have to sit and then apply for the actual nursing portion of the program. We do allow progression into the nursing portion of the program.
Speaker 3:And nursing is such a hands-on field. We're an online university, so how do we reconcile that?
Speaker 1:So we've really tried to become very creative and innovative in how we do that. So what we really have done is we've built this online model. So all of our didactic, all of the book learning, is done online. So all of those times and it's agnostic of time and place so students can do this after work, they can do it after they put their kids to bed, they can do it on the weekends, I can do it at the soccer game, they really can do the book learning anytime they need to do that. So they sit there and they get all of that didactic content, that learning piece.
Speaker 1:Then we built these boot camp sessions for our learning lab sessions, in our clinical sessions, and the boot camp sessions are really made for working adults so that you don't have to step away from your life, your family, your kids. You don't have to step away and do all of those things for every Tuesday, and every Tuesday and Thursday for the next two and a half years, we put all of your on the ground, as we like to call them learning opportunity in these chunks, so that you're able to plan those chunks, you're able to come to those sessions. So we have two on the ground learning lab sessions. So those learning lab sessions are set up by region. So students will go to these regional labs for four days twice during their program. That's the only time they have to travel at any point away from their very small community, wherever they may be. Once those learning lab sessions are done, all of their clinicals are done in what we call their district. Students pick their district when they enroll and all their clinical opportunities are done right there where they live, all of those sessions in boot camp style.
Speaker 1:That is very important because in the health of the nation what we find is there are basically healthcare deserts, just like anything else. You'll see this in our rural communities. You will see this in our communities. They're not really right in that urban center. They don't have a college nearby. They may not even have a community college nearby. They have a critical access hospital and that's all that they have in a particular location. So by doing this in districts and by really limiting the time they have to come in, the students will spend all of their learning time in their community.
Speaker 1:And what we know is if students stay in their community to learn, go to their clinicals in their communities where they live, they'll stay in that community to practice their healthcare. They will stay in their community and that starts to do one of two things Not only does it bring healthcare to the community, but it also brings diversity to healthcare, because now your healthcare worker looks like the community in which you live. These are the people you've grown up with. You know these individuals. You trust these individuals. They care about their community. They stay in their communities. So this is an essential way of doing this. So, instead of bringing all the students to the learning, we're bringing all the learning to the students for about 90% of their program.
Speaker 3:That the nurses are able to stay in their communities, where they have families, where they have a job lined up, is so essential, especially for these rural areas where they have a hard time drawing in new nurses. I love that. You mentioned earlier that our students who enroll with the WG Pre-Licensure Program they graduate with a bachelor's degree, so can you speak a bit about why that's so important to hospitals for nurses to be educated at that?
Speaker 1:level.
Speaker 1:It's not even so much, even just for our hospitals per se to have our nurses educated to that level of the bachelor's degree, but it's really essential to the health of the nation into the community and the population.
Speaker 1:What we have found is our baccalaureate prepared nurses have better patient outcomes. We're seeing that those hospitals that have baccalaureate prepared nurses have less time in hospital, less returns, better patient outcomes. Just all of those things that you really want in a healthcare system is really to make sure that you are providing that evidence-based, high quality healthcare, and studies have shown that our bachelor's prepared nurses really have that. They have that ability to go that step beyond that, more into that, why you know why everything is happening and bringing in those evidence-based resources and those practices that they've seen and by then, by having that, we've just seen better patient outcomes and in the end, that's really what you want want better patient outcomes, less time in the hospitals and less return visits to the hospital for those individuals needing that attention Better patient outcomes is sounds like a key reason that we would want our nurses to be educated at a bachelor's level.
Speaker 3:I also wonder whether that would incentivize nurses to stay in the field longer. I know that they've been through a very rough time over the past few years especially, and as a former nurse yourself in an emergency department, you have lived that experience and now you are making decisions that impact thousands of nurses across the country. Can you tell us a bit about how, even in your role now, you're able to keep your fingers on the pulse of the nurses that are operating across these various hospitals and how they're doing?
Speaker 1:It's hard. You know, it's really kind of hard to kind of see what's happening in the profession. You know, during the pandemic we really relied on our nurses, we really relied on everybody in the healthcare system. But those nurses were there day in and day out with something we didn't really understand. We didn't fully know how to treat Losing such a large number of people in our communities, the fear that just dealing with that day in and day out, just the lack of resources, not having PPE you know that personal protective equipment to help take care of them, coming up with ideas like, well, I guess we'll wash it and reuse it, I think we'll be okay. And all of these nurses are here doing this, leaving their families and going and trying to do that. And at the time nurses were kind of seen as that hero. You know, here is this hero. Thank you for all you've done and thank you for all you're giving. But then when the pandemic ends, where are those resources? So the nurses, unfortunately, are exhausted and they saw things they never thought they'd have to see. They lived through things they weren't really sure they had to live through and so we typically in this country just have people stay in the workforce for a relatively long time. We typically stay more so than any other countries. We work a lot longer. We really have this passion to stay in it. Nurses are terrible about that. We've stayed for a really long time. We really love it. We love what we're doing, and a lot of them said enough, this is enough, this was it. This was all I wanted to see.
Speaker 1:And so it took its toll. And so we lost a lot of veteran nurses. We really lost a lot of veteran nurses. I don't think people realize the average age of the nurse at the bedside dropped considerably after the pandemic. We went from an average age in the 50s to an average age of about 46, 47 dropped considerably. That is you losing your veteran nurses. They have left the ones that had all those years of experience, all that knowledge. We also had a lot that.
Speaker 1:Of course hospitals have that financial incentive to try to find nurses in this deficit. They're traveling all over the country. We have a lot of travel nurses coming in that don't know the communities, don't know the cultures. But we need them. We need them at that particular area, but again, they don't have maybe have that deep breath and knowledge. They're not going to be your ones to take the next generation of nurses.
Speaker 1:So for me, what you really have to look out from this and the seed I sit in is now is understand how hard that workforce has worked, how hard that workforce has tried and how strained that workforce is. And on the flip side, I have a requirement to place my students in clinical. Every regulatory agency across the country regulates to some degree the number of hours, the number of placements, the number of opportunities that students have to do and in a acute care setting. We can use other settings, but majority of it has to be in a acute care setting to meet those requirements. So I have to understand what is the environment I'm sending my students into to keep them excited and passionate and wanting to join nursing, wanting to go into this noble profession, when we're having them go into hospitals where nurses that are training them are exhausted in that piece.
Speaker 1:How do you balance that? So I think for me it's very essential to know that I need to know what we have, know what. My ask is how can we lean on these health care systems? But also, how can we support these health care system so that when the next generation of comes in, they don't run into a nurse that's just done, burnt out. They don't run into that nurse that just had a patient hit them, bite them, slap them, because that's what's happening in nursing.
Speaker 1:There's so much violence in nursing. I have to ensure that my students are prepared for that. They know how to have that crucial conversation. They know how to have that heart to heart. They also know how to do self care. They also know how to turn around and take care of themselves, provide them with the health care sources that they need and resources. I think that's why WGU is so important is we have so many student resources, not just academically but socially and emotionally in all of those places, because those same things we need for our current health care providers is the same thing we need for our students, is that support and that encouragement as they're going through their years here with us at WGU to become that next generation of nursing. You've just got to keep your pulse on that and be really connected to your partners and your communities and know what are your partners, your communities, struggling with, so we can prepare the nurses for that when they go to their clinicals and later when they join the profession.
Speaker 3:As an online university, I think a lot of people assume that we don't focus on things like self care, emotional wellness, and that's absolutely not the case, so I appreciate you reiterating that. If you were speaking with state legislator about ways that they can help resolve the nursing shortage, what would you recommend to them? How can we help them grow more nurses?
Speaker 1:I think what it is really to help with the workforce shortage. To help with the nursing shortage, there are really two key factors, and there are a lot of more. There are two key factors I would want every legislator to know is that it requires two things to create the next generation of nursing. It requires clinical placements during the student's learning journey and it requires educators to actually teach the next generation of nursing. If you look at all the studies and all the research that has been done, you'll notice that even in like 2021, aacn did a survey 91,000 qualified nursing applicants were turned away from nursing programs because of two major factors clinical placements and then also nursing faculty. They didn't have enough nursing faculty. So let's tackle that nursing faculty first. I think that's something to look at.
Speaker 1:So you kind of heard my story a little bit earlier in the things that I talked about, about how I was in education and I loved education and it was so financially devastating to be an educator that I literally could not live my life, and so I went into nursing so that I could have the funds to be able to take care of my family and take care about all the things I needed to do. So here we have bedside nurses. We have nurses that are working at the bedside. Not only are we asking them to go back and get an advanced degree, so we're asking them to go back and get a master's that their employer may or may not pay for, that you may or may not get any financial support to go do. And then when you graduate with this additional degree which again, you're not going to make any more money at the hospital for getting that degree, they're not going to pay you anything different. There is no differential in hospitals, for the most part related to level of education of the nurse, and so we're not really getting anything for it. So, hey, go ahead and incur a lot more debt and then turn around and take a 20 to 30% pay cut to go into nursing education, and that's what we're asking people to do. And so, as a legislature, until you figure out a way to help us level the playing field, until you look for some ways to maybe provide support for that pay disparity between those two things and I know a lot of times, legislators and others that I've spoken to about this so well, why don't we just pay them more? Where does that cost come from? Who pays that cost. Well, that would be the student, so the student would have to pay that. The student would have to bridge that gap between those two things. So now we've made higher education no longer affordable to the majority of Americans in our country. So you can't keep making education cost more and more to cover for these disparities or have to be other ways that we've done this, other way that we subsidized, other ways that we helped that. So the first thing is really looking at how do we treat nursing as we treat many other professions in healthcare, specifically medical education. Look at some of those items that we put into place to help individuals become physicians, to help hospitals support physicians in their residencies and in their clinical rotation and to support physicians going into faculty roles. You will see a lot of those things that have been put in place are probably the same things and do need to be the same things that we put in for nursing education. So that's our faculty. If we don't get more faculty going into nursing education, we're not going to be able to train more nurses With them.
Speaker 1:All nurses have to do clinical rotations. These are called direct clinical hours. Every state has a different requirement. They are not universal, although all graduates of a pre-licendure nursing program take the exact same national licensure exam. The states all have different requirements on the type of education provided, the number of direct clinical hours, the number of simulation hours. States and their regulatory agencies have different requirements for these things. So even though we have a national exam, you will have to do different things in each one of those states. All of those states, however, require direct clinical hours. They could be different based on that state.
Speaker 1:So here we have these hospital partners with a very strained scale, a very tired nursing scale and a requirement that all students in a nursing program have clinical placement hours, that they are going in and working with these nurses one on one at the bedside. They are sitting there doing it, which again slows a nurse down even more because again they do have to explain that they have to train them. We don't give any paper clarity there either. We do not provide any supplemental funding to those hospital systems. We don't provide any funding to those bedside nurses, those preceptors, those coaches that are taking those students. We don't provide any funding for any of this.
Speaker 1:You're asking everybody to do it out of the intrinsic nature of goodness and again, nurses are very intrinsic, but they're also very doctor and so at some point you really have to look at how can our government officials help us with this? If we're really making nursing a priority, then we need to prioritize our ability to get clinical placements. We need to find some ways to support our hospitals to make it viable, to bring the students in, really create these academic partnerships. It can't just be we want to do it. It has to be funding available to support us doing this work, because it is hard work. Can't ask a nurse to have seven patients, eight patients and nursing students. You can't ask them to be working those hours, working those shifts, filling those gaps and, by the way, teach the next generation. We've got to provide some support in both areas to really grow nursing and really help alleviate the shortage. That's the only way it's going to happen.
Speaker 3:So I'm hearing that we need to learn from the way that we educate physicians and how we also make sure that we are not burdening nurses who are already doing one of the most physically emotionally demanding jobs there is, with a second job and no additional pay or resources to support them.
Speaker 1:Correct. We have to do something to make it viable for everyone. There has to be support and it does need to be financial support. It needs to be support to lower ratios. You can take more students or something where we're providing additional education support for that facility to offload this particular area. There have to be things that we're doing. It has to be areas that we provide that.
Speaker 1:And again, you cannot take such significant pay cuts with no support to get the higher education in the first place and then take such a significant pay cut to come into nursing education. It just can't be such a disparity that the differences is just too great for many wonderful educators to actually cross over. Cross that threshold. They just financially could not do it. So without ways of paying back graduate education, doing something where you're encouraging people to get their master's and doctorate in nursing whether that's a PhD or a DNP or any of those types of degrees but you really need to create this next level of educators to really do that. And again, opening up those clinical spaces. You just have to figure out a way to help support hospitals. They want to do it. They just don't have the funding and the ability to do it.
Speaker 3:So, kim, I want to end us on a brighter note. The sun is rising. Are there states that are doing this particularly well, or solutions that you've seen implemented that are working?
Speaker 1:There are states, I think, that are really trying to do this. I do think there are states that are trying to really figure out the solve. There have been great things. Some of our states Missouri's done many things to really help try to help with nursing labs and either physical space to teach them within a school setting. You will see this. Texas and a few other states have done great apprentice programs. Utah's done a wonderful apprentice program as well, really trying to figure out how do we bridge that gap, maybe do some cross-education in their capstone courses and in their clinicals and looking at how we can account for these things.
Speaker 1:States have looked at maybe changing some of the requirements, but on a grand scale. There have been some great partnerships in the southeast and in the central areas. There have been some great partnerships with healthcare organizations. But unfortunately, a lot of what we're doing in that are great efforts out there. Of course, all of those opportunities. If, when you read them say this will create 40 more spaces or this will create 80 more spaces, anymore nursing spaces, really 40 and 80 isn't going to solve it. We really have to figure out a bigger way.
Speaker 1:I think we're on the right track. I think we're moving in that direction and states are really asking how can we do this? We really have to look at it much in a grander scale. I really think, in that it's now looking okay, is understanding that it's not just the physical space to educate them and it's not just some of these other insular areas, it's really saying, okay, this is our commitment. This funding is going to fund 1,000 students through these clinical healthcare systems, let's just say, or something else, or these hospital systems, or these hospitals in general. We're going to fund these. These are going to go with this goal. This goal is going to commit to getting ex-students through this program. I think we're really going to have to get a little more prescriptive, in that I mean, there are states that are really trying to do that and you're marking those funds Again. A lot of those funds came from the Cures Act, which, again, we'll have to see if any of those funds get reappropriated again.
Speaker 3:Can we talk about what's next? Can I ask you what's next for WGU? How are you guys thinking about this in the next five to 10 years?
Speaker 1:What's next for us? What I'm really excited about right now for us is we're really on the cusp of being able to bring pre-licensure to more states. I think for us we're super excited because we think we've finally really figured it out and figured out how can we do this in a cost-effective way across the country to really open those doors, we're currently building regional labs across the country. We'll have these five regional labs that make it much easier for students to get the learning lab opportunities that are again in that boot camp style. By doing that, what it's allowed us to do is go from 11 states last year to now being in 19 states across the country, with plans to go into a majority of our states within the next couple of years. What that'll allow us to do is really open up opportunity, really open up entry pathways, open up access to all of the communities.
Speaker 1:Because of our learning online, we are able to teach all the students where they live. You're really able to put a much larger emphasis on the students and on their communities and their learning in those areas. That also spreads out the need for those clinical placements. It spreads out those needs for those educators across the country. It really gives us this opportunity to move. I'm really excited. Over the last four months we've doubled the number of students in our pre-licensure program. As we continue to move into more states and do that, we're hoping we really can impact this on a much greater scale, Really be able to make the dent that we need in nursing education to really not only change the trajectory of the nursing shortage but also to change the face of nursing and have it look much more like the communities in which we live. I'm really excited about that and excited about what we've done in the last four months with the enrollment growth, but even in the last 12 months with finishing up three out of our five regional labs.
Speaker 3:Well, Kim, I cannot think of anything better than education at scale where nurses are able to stay and thrive in their communities. Thank you for all of the work that you do for the Levitt School of Health, for all of the nurses across these 50 states. Thank you for being a guest on Sage Advice.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I hope everybody really looks at it and say what can you do from your lens? So I'm really excited with the future breeze.
Speaker 2:Sage Advice is brought to you by Western Governors University. To learn more about WGU and how it's pioneering a new path in higher education, visit wguedu. If you enjoyed our discussion today, don't forget to subscribe to Sage Advice wherever you get your podcasts and it's next time for more insightful conversations. Until then, keep learning, keep growing and keep pushing the boundaries of what education can achieve From the team here at WGU. Thank you for listening to Sage Advice.
