Rob:  Oklahoma nursing students are facing a shortage of teachers as Chaz Kyser reports, fewer teachers now could mean fewer nurses in the future.
Charlotte Prewitt:  I don’t feel any breathing.
Chaz Foster-Kyser:  Charlotte Prewitt’s desire to help and comfort people led her to nursing and her desire to educate others about the field, led her to teach.
Charlotte Prewitt:  I saw lots of students when I worked at the hospital, and I was always the magnet to take the students around and show them skills and work with them while I was actually working too, and I enjoyed it and I wanted to continue doing that.
Chaz:  She hopes more Oklahoma nurses will choose to also become teachers, because of the impact they’ll have in their student’s lives, and the fact that they’re desperately needed.
Charlotte:  There is a pretty good applicant number of students wanting to get into the profession. There is a much lower number of teachers and nurses willing to teach it.
Chaz:  This disparity led only forty percent of qualified applicants to be admitted to Oklahoma’s two-year nursing programs and only sixty-eight percent to four-year nursing programs, creating a roadblock for students, and further worrying those in the health care industry.
Charlotte:  If we don't get more students out into the workforce, we are going to be stressed ourselves with the overwhelming number of patients to take care of and fewer nurses that are going to be there to take care of them.
Chaz:  The problem is almost like a ticking bomb to the executive director of the Oklahoma Health Care Workforce.  According to Sheryl McLain by the year 2012, we will have 3,000 fewer nurses than we need.   And the increasing lack of nurses couldn’t be coming at a worse time.
Sheryl:  We have an aging population in Oklahoma.  We also have an aging workforce in Oklahoma, so many of the Baby Boomers are set to retire by 2012, the rest of the Boomers actually, and that's going to be significant for our state.
Nurse:  Our goal is to keep you pain free and ambulating as soon as possible.
Chaz:  Partially because hospitals may have to scramble to meet the needs of these older citizens.
Sheryl:  People who are over 65 years old consume four times as much health care as those under 65.
Nurse Instructor:  And of course make sure suctioning the correct person.
Chaz:  And as Charlotte knows, a hospital with too few nurses can’t offer the care patients need.
Charlotte:  Safety can be a major issue and that's the number one issue in hospitals.  It's going to be much more difficult if they have pain and they call for a nurse and she is three or four rooms down attending to another patient
and there if no one else there to tend to them they would be waiting longer to get their treatments.
Chaz:  While the solution to the problem may seem as simple as just asking more nurses to teach, there are a number of factors that prevent many from doing so. And not surprisingly, money is one of them.
Charlotte:  Nurses can get more income working in a service setting, in a provider setting, than they can teaching.
Chaz:  Nursing instructors with a master's degree can expect to make between $45,000 to $52,000, while nurse practitioners with a master's can earn between $60,000 to $80,000, and that’s not including a signing bonus.
Charlotte:  It's difficult for people to really want to take a $20,000 pay cut to do that.
Chaz:  Charlotte teaches nursing for a CareerTech program, which she says pays instructors a bit higher than average. But she still had to pursue a master’s to get the position and she considers this another potential roadblock for nurses.
Charlotte:  If you're taking a pay cut and the you're having to go back to school, a lot of people just can't afford to do that.
Chaz:  A nursing master’s degree program can cost more than $17,000 but  Charlotte says she is happy with her decision to teach.
Charlotte:  Teaching is fun. It's so rewarding to see somebody that has a knowledge base of almost zero and you start building them up and you see by the end of their program how much they've learned, and it's like you've given them wings to take off.
Rob:  Joining me now is our Chaz Kyser.  Well Chaz, It looks like the nursing shortage will be a huge problem for Oklahoma for quite some time.  Is this same problem typical around the nation?
Chaz:  Oh yes.  Practically every state is actually affected.  While this story focused on Oklahoma this is actually a national problem and it’s one that’s been building up for years.  According to the U.S. government, more than one million new and replacements nurses will be needed by 2016.
Rob:  Wow.  That’s a heck of a lot of nurses.  Is there any indication that we will have enough nurses by that time?
Chaz:  Well, I do not like to paint a very dismal picture, but when you look at the data, it really doesn’t seem possible. To meet the projected demand for nurses, the U.S. would need to graduate ninety percent more nurses from nursing programs than they currently are doing now.
Rob:  And that brings us back to our original problem of not having enough nursing instructors.
Chaz:  Exactly.  Now, to be fair, there are a number of things that states, including Oklahoma, are looking into or currently doing to increase nursing faculty.  This includes helping nurses pay for some or all of their education so they can actually afford their advanced degree to teach because it is expensive, and increasing the salaries of nursing faculty so that they actually want to teach.