Relentless stress of on-the-job training and the looming specter of licensure examination have taken a toll on nursing students nationwide—a problem nursing school chiefs hope can be solved with an online program that tracks student progress.
About three in four students who enter nursing school earn their degree in the field, and beyond that, the passing rate for nursing students who take their state’s licensure test is around 88 percent, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN).
Still, nursing school officials say, students suffer from the burnout of long shifts taking care of many patients with a variety of health issues that require almost constant monitoring.
And like many higher-education programs that keep careful documentation of a student’s strengths and weaknesses—including how the student handles nursing’s many stresses—some schools have turned to a reporting system called ReadyPoint Nursing, which lets educators maintain detailed online files of each student.
Using the technology, nursing professors and instructors can more easily target instruction and help students move through the program without teetering on the edge of burnout.
“Nursing courses tend to be free standing, and there’s not a lot of communication between the people who run those courses,” said Audrey Berman, dean of the Samuel Merritt University School of Nursing in San Francisco. “Some students just have what we call reality shock, and that’s a big factor. Nursing is hard work. We need to be there to help them in whatever they need to improve on.”
Nursing students don’t often struggle with classroom concepts, Berman said, but rather the application of those concepts. ReadyPoint Nursing, a Pearson product, helps educators keep tabs on both aspects of nurse training, giving precise readouts of a student’s readiness, along with any areas in need of remediation.
More than most college majors, nursing schools don’t harp as much on a student’s quiz grades as they do on nursing performance—applying curriculum in the hospital or clinic. That’s why the ReadyPoint system includes more than classroom performance in its evaluation of a nursing student.
“We’re very competency focused—it’s not like a math major,” Berman said. “Students need to learn how to use their knowledge in the actual delivery of care, and faculty need to know where each student stands.”
Maura Connor, director of digital learning and assessment for Pearson Education, said the tracking system—which will be used in nursing schools this summer after a series of pilot programs—measures student progress against standards used to create licensure exams that prospective nurses must pass before they can practice.
“It’s very numbers and data driven, it’s very concrete,” she said. “So it’s an intuitive way for [nursing faculty] to determine a student’s strengths and where they may need remediation.
Connor and Berman said improving nursing faculty’s ability to address student shortfalls before they encounter the burnout of nursing training would help fill longtime nursing shortages across the country.
More than 121,000 job ads for registered nurses were posted in May 2011, a 46 percent increase from May 2010, according to Wanted Analytics, which tracks employment openings.
The nursing field thrived even during the recession that officially began in December 2007 and lingered until the end of 2009. The health care industry added more than 400,000 jobs during that span, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Nursing job growth is expected to grow through the current decade, according to federal statistics. The registered nurse workforce will grow by 22 percent by 2018, and by 2025, the nursing shortage is projected to stand at 260,000 unfilled jobs.
Without renewed attention to the nursing school strains that lead to burnout, Berman said, colleges and universities won’t be able to help fill those growing shortages.
“The novice nurse is always susceptible to burnout,” she said. “They face long shifts and lots of patients. … We need to communicate and help them deal with those things.”
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