Peter Merril, Campus Carrier news editor
Heath Hutcheson, Campus Carrier staff writer
Last month Audrey Morgan, a philanthropist from Atlanta, donated 5 million dollars to Berry College’s Nursing Department. Morgan has contributed in many other ways on Berry’s campus such as through funding Morgan and Sister’s Theater.
Carolyn Reilly, director for the division of nursing, said that the money would be used to provide scholarships for nursing students.
“[Morgan] saw the need,” Reilly said. “There’s a huge nursing demand right now, about a 30 percent critical shortage across the nation. She knows that there are some high-quality, well-educated students out there who need scholarships so that they can become nurses.”
Reilly said that scholarships would be offered to students who excelled in high school and who practiced the “five Cs” of nursing: competence, caring, compassion, creativity and cultural humility.
According to the NurseJournal, at the height of the pandemic, there was a 14 to 1 patient to nurse ratio. This problem was further exacerbated by extreme stress and burn out affecting the nurses, which led to a high percentage of turn over. While the patient to nurse ratio has since come down, the country is still plagued by a deficiency of health care providers.
“I would say it’s a lot of things [that are causing the nursing shortage],” said Reilly. “For one, the aging baby boomer. They require a lot more health care services. Health care in general has grown as we’ve moved into the twenty first century and we have people requiring more health care. I’d say that our population as a whole are probably less healthy than they were 50 years ago. You marry that with the advances in health care, so now we’re able to detect things earlier. So, there’s an increased demand for health care, there’s a lot less health care providers because of COVID and the baby boomers are all retiring.”
Reilly said that many nurses are aging out of their occupations, and that the average age for a nurse is now over 50 years old. Despite admission numbers showing that some students were initially scared off from careers in nursing by the pandemic, there are now more applicants than ever for the department at Berry.
“There are so many students that want to become nurses that the problem is that we don’t have enough spots,” Reilly said. “There was a little bit of a hit from COVID and just in general, but we are back up to admitting a class of 40 every fall and then we’re going to expand. We’re doubling the size of our program.”
Haley Oleson, a nursing student at Berry said, “I think the number one thing will be getting the
staff to multiply the number of students – and it will be really important that if we do expand, to
get more staff as well.”
One of the biggest things Oleson believes that this donation could provide is expansion as far
as the time of year that classes are offered for the nursing program.
“There could be potential to start classes in spring as well as the fall,” Oleson. “Currently you have certain classes in the fall and certain classes in the spring that are not offered at any other time. If you need to retake a class or go back and review stuff, you have to wait a whole year before that next cohort comes up. I’m hoping with this new donation we will have a possibility for expansion and see the nursing program flourish.”
Oleson also hopes that the donation will result in more class options, as well as professors and technology. Ni Vang, another nursing student at Berry, agreed that the donation money should go toward expanding the amount of staff members.
“For me personally, I think we should strengthen the program before you have more students, meaning getting more staff and being better equipped for incoming students.”
Reilly said that by Jan. 2024, a second cohort of 40 students is expected to be added to the nursing department. Berry’s nursing department requires that students get hands on experience in local settings. Because of Rome’s small size, it would prove difficult for more than 80 students to acquire the needed experience without overwhelming the city.
“Our students do about 650, maybe 700 hours of clinical in the two years that they’re with us,” Reilly said. “That means they go to the hospital, and they deliver care there or ambulatory care in schools for children, just different settings for that. Hospice, homecare, etc. We can only send so many students at a time to those places to receive their clinical education with one of our instructors, so we can’t just accept 200 students.”
Hands on learning is immensely important to the nursing department, and it is not just limited to the Rome area. Next year, juniors in the department will be going to rural Africa.
“We have an immersion program,” Reilly said. “And so next August we are going to Kenya to actually work with patients. In the past they’ve gone to Costa Rica, but that was shut down because of COVID and so then they couldn’t go for several years. Now we’re hoping to restart that, but in Kenya this time.”
According to Reilly, 100% of nursing students at Berry acquire job offers before graduation, a statistic indicating a successful program.