Kansas nursing shortage: Recruitment efforts, The

Kansas Nurse,  Sep 2003  

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The large national nursing organizations formed an entity called "Nurses for a Healthier Tomorrow" to focus a recruitment campaign for nursing students and raise the public awareness of the contributions nurses make to communities. That campaign is using resources from foundations, the pharmaceutical industry and other interested parties to promote their message. It has several phases and needs funding to implement and go forward.

More recently the Johnson and Johnson Company conducted a nationwide media blitz to raise awareness about nursing as a career, and continues to make available very high quality promotional materials for use by organizations. Included in my presentation is a sample of the brochures they make available.

To capitalize on these media efforts KSNA, through our Foundation, the Kansas Nurses Foundation secured some grant funding from the Sunflower Foundation to create a "Resource Center" for Recruitment material and create a Kansas specific web-site that promotes nursing at all levels, beginning with nurses aides, through LPN and RN education. This web site is now up at "kansasnursingcarecrs.com" and links to all nursing programs in the state providing formal education and training, and materials to promote nursing among three audiences: school age children, high-school age career seeking individuals, and the non-traditional student going back to school or making a career adjustment. In the past couple of years we also conducted contest that senior nursing students could enter for the development of materials that could be used to promote nursing as career in Kansas to school age children of the current generation. Contest entries became the property of KSNA, and we are using these materials on the web site as well. The school age generation, as you can imagine has grown up with a different "high-tech" perspective and hopefully we will be successful in appealing to them with the materials and presentations developed. Ideally, we've talked about recommending all the Kansas Schools Nursing have their seniors (individually) conduct one presentation annually to a 5th grade glass about Nursing as Career and over a 5 year period of time we would be pretty successful at introducing this concept to a majority of the 30,000 5th graders each year.

The Nurse Educations in Kansas have also been working towards strategies that ease the transition for LPN's seeking to become RN's and Associate Degree Nurses to seek Bachelor's degrees. They have been successful in improving the articulation plans (required as a result of the 1202 Commission recommendations of 1976 in Kansas) so that credits arc more easily recognized and transferred and students seeking further education are spared the challenges that use to accompany transferring education credits and gaining recognition of previously completed course work. This endeavor demonstrates great leadership and commitment by our educators, representing the RN & LPN programs in the Vo-Technical schools, Community Colleges, Regents Schools, and public and private sector programs. Kansas has been a leader in "articulation" opportunities for nursing, and this work has taken us to a new level of sophistication for potential students.