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WVU Study Looks At Full Practice Authority

Allowing nurse practitioners to provide a broader range of care can improve health outcomes in underserved rural and minority communities according to a new WVU study.

Allowing nurse practitioners to provide a broader range of care can improve health outcomes in underserved rural and minority communities according to a new WVU study

The study ties together the worsening shortage of primary care providers, the importance of enabling patients from communities of color to choose primary care providers who share their racial and ethnic backgrounds and the debate over allowing nurse practitioners to exercise Full Practice Authority .

West Virginia is one of 26 states and D.C. to allow full practice authority to Nurse Practitioners.

Alicia Plemmons coordinated the research at the new Center for the Study of Occupational Regulation at West Virginia University.

“Allowing these nurse practitioners to be able to treat patients independently, allows them to have the mobility to move into new places and to seek new patients that may not have had health care otherwise,” Plemmons said.

The study also found that enabling patients from communities of color to choose primary care providers who share their racial and ethnic backgrounds led more people to seek medical care.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the United States is facing a projected shortage of between 17,000 to 50,000 by 2034.

“Now is that the concern of potential primary care shortage, especially because many physicians tend to go into specializations that may be more monetarily lucrative,” Plemmons said. “The idea is we have an aging population, we have so many individuals, what are we going to do when it comes to primary care access? A majority of nurse practitioners actually focus particularly on primary care, and they tend to work more in areas that may not have the same health care access.”

Legislators Hear Update On State’s Effort To Address Nursing Shortage

Legislators have tried to help address the state’s nursing shortage, but one of their actions may have had an unintended consequence.

Senate Bill 518 became law in March of this year and aimed to update and streamline state code relating to registered nursing.

As members of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability heard Tuesday, one provision that removed the licensure fee for RNs and APRNs has had an unintended consequence on the state’s nursing education.

West Virginia Center for Nursing Administrator Jordyn Reed said the licensure fees accounted for 75 percent of the organization’s revenue and threatened the state’s nursing scholarship programs.

“The West Virginia Nursing Scholarship Program, about 75 to 80 percent of our revenue goes to this program,” she said. “So losing that funding via SB 518 is going to affect this program, we’re not going to be able to continue it without additional funding.”

Reed said the program is one of the most successful because recipients are required to complete a service obligation in the state, and as of August 2020, 88.7 percent of service obligation completers still maintain an active West Virginia nursing license.

Dr. Cynthia Persily, Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences at the Higher Education Policy Commission, said a line item for the Center for Nursing’s annual budget of $500,000 was already submitted to the governor’s office.

She also outlined a restructuring of the Center for Nursing.

“The legislation that we will propose will be to repeal the section of code that created the West Virginia Center for Nursing because it creates it as a separate state agency, and then bring some of that language over into the appropriate part of higher education,” Persily said.

Reed also highlighted the state’s nursing academy model that exposes middle and high school students to nursing careers by bringing them to health care facilities in schools of nursing. In 2022, there were seven academies across the state serving more than 200 students.

“This is a pipeline program, the only one that is nursing specific in the state,” Reed said. “There’s mentoring, there’s career shadowing, and there’s hands-on activities to get kids excited about nursing.”

Persily also highlighted a nurse recruitment program held over the summer, inspired by the West Virginia Ascend Program, that enticed out of state nurses with a relocation bonus.

“It was to bring nurses from out of state to West Virginia,” she said. “In a very short period of time, May through September, we brought in 102 nurses from out of state to move to West Virginia and pledge to work in West Virginia.”

COVID-19 Hospitalizations Climb Closer To State’s Limit

COVID-19 cases in the state have remained around 3,000 active cases for weeks, but hospitalizations continue to climb.

West Virginia reached 399 COVID-19 hospitalizations Tuesday, bringing the state that much closer to the predetermined statewide capacity of 500 coronavirus hospitalizations.

“We have moved our number back to 500 to do planning exercises, and that, at this point, is scheduled for in the near future,” State Coronavirus Czar Dr. Clay Marsh said.

Marsh pointed out that the hospitals’ issue is not just with COVID cases, but with broader stressors on the medical system, like staffing shortages.

“Hospitals are currently not having capacity limitations just because of COVID,” Marsh said. “Many hospitals have big backlogs of surgeries and medical care that people put off during the COVID pandemic surges that we had seen previously. So the hospitals are very full, both with some more patients with COVID, but also with people without. So we continue to work with them closely.”

Gov. Jim Justice and Marsh continue to urge that the best protection against serious infection and long COVID is vaccination.

Health System Plans Initiative To Increase Nurses

The West Virginia University Health System plans to launch an initiative that will increase the number of nurses in the state, officials said.

WVU Health President and CEO Albert Wright Jr. told theCharleston Gazette-Mail’s “Outside the Echo Chamber” that the system plans to start an associate’s degree nursing program. Wright said the aim is to alleviate a “particularly challenging” nursing shortage in the state.

“The only way we fix the nursing shortage is to drastically and systematically increase the number of nurses we’re producing,” he said.

Wright said the initiative will be based in Morgantown but will have cohorts around the state that will help recent high school graduates complete an associate’s degree quickly and begin working.

WVU Health partnered with Thomas Health earlier this year making it the state’s largest health system.

Multiple new programs have been announced since Gov. Jim Justice cited the nursing shortage caused by the coronavirus pandemic when he announced in December that the state would use federal stimulus funding to aggressively recruit and train nurses over the next four years.

W.Va.’s Higher Ed Leaders Approve New Nursing Programs At Concord, Glenville And University Status For Bluefield State

The West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission on Thursday approved two new Bachelor of Science in Nursing programs for Concord University and Glenville State University.

Gov. Jim Justice in December announced the West Virginia Nursing Workforce Expansion Program, which aims to address the ongoing nursing shortage. He said in that press briefing that the state has seen 1,700 nurses leave the field, and it’s been compounded by the stress of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the hope is the expansion program will change this trend.

The West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission on Thursday approved two new Bachelor of Science in Nursing programs for Concord University and Glenville State University.

“We are tremendously grateful to Gov. Justice for providing this historic funding to support the expansion of nursing education programs across West Virginia,” said Sarah Armstrong Tucker, West Virginia’s chancellor of higher education. “Through these new projects, our postsecondary education community will be better positioned to help shore up West Virginia’s nursing workforce, which, in turn, will help support our nurses working tirelessly on the front lines right now.”

The two new programs are among 27 nursing education programs at colleges, universities, schools of nursing, and career technical education centers across West Virginia that have received a total of $25.5 million through the governor’s nursing workforce expansion.

Concord will offer its own nursing program, while Glenville will offer its BSN through a partnership with Marshall University.

Concord’s BSN will be a 120 credit-hour program and will focus on meeting rural healthcare needs to help address the shortage of registered nurses in southern West Virginia.

Glenville State University will offer an educational opportunity that is not currently available in the central part of the state.

Concord’s BSN will begin in spring 2023, while Glenville’s will begin in the fall of that same year.

The HEPC on Thursday also approved university status for Bluefield State College.

The change will not go into effect until an official change is made by the school’s board of governors and the state legislature.

The criteria for university status, according to the HEPC, include offering at least one master’s-level degree program; having an approved mission statement that provides for the offering of graduate programs; obtaining the approval of the Higher Learning Commission to offer any master’s degree program; and having at least two-thirds of its faculty holding a terminal degree.

Program Aims To Address Nursing Shortage In W.Va.

A West Virginia healthcare system has partnered with a junior college on a program aimed at addressing the shortage of nurses in the state.

Mon Health System and West Virginia Junior College signed a letter of intent on Monday to launch a nursing education program that will put students at the school on an accelerated path to becoming nurses, officials said during a signing ceremony.

Mon Health nurses will serve as faculty and the students will have digital coursework as well as learning through work at the hospital, what Mon Health System President and CEO David Goldberg called patient-side, The Dominion Post reported.

The program plans to open enrollment in September and start its first class next April.

The collaboration, Goldberg said, will serve “to bring not only the best nurses to patient-side through Mon Health, but keep people in this community, grow our own, take care of our own neighbors, family members and friends, so we continue to be the best health care location in north-central West Virginia and improve our health care outcomes.”

West Virginia Junior College CEO Chad Callen said nursing shortages are at near crisis levels in some areas of the state.

“Such challenges require bold thinking and innovative, out-of-the-box approaches,” he said.