Education Capacity

Two years ago this month, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston began a clinical training program for student nurses known as a Dedicated Education Unit (DEU). The DEU, incorporated into a 36-bed adult inpatient unit and hailed as a unique education capacity solution, was established to provide students with an opportunity to work with seasoned nursing staff in caring for surgical and multi-trauma patients who began their hospital stay in the emergency department.

For Immediate Release: January 5, 2010 

Best in Nursing Education Capacity Solutions to Be Featured in Series of Articles American Journal of Nursing to Profile State Practices with Proven Results

In the November 2, 2009 edition of Community College Week, educators and administrators from two-year colleges around the country read an opinion editorial about the relationship between education and the nursing shortage called “Closing the Nursing Shortage Demands Creativity, Collaboration.”

Although limited educational capacity resulted in nearly 40,000 applicants being turned away from nursing schools, 2009 marks the ninth consecutive year of  increases in the number of students enrolled in nursing degree programs. More nurses prepared to deliver high quality health care is good news for all Americans. This news comes from the latest annual survey from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). 

The growing shortage of nurses in the U.S. is well documented, and as a recent item in the New York Times reminds us, there is also a crisis in the number of family and general practice physicians—there could be 40,000 too few by 2020, even without health care reform. Meantime, nurse practitioners (NPs), nurses with advanced degrees who can perform a host of primary care services that physicians perform, are willing and able to fill the gap.