Nursing News:
Providence hospital gets aggressive with scholarships

By JILL SMITH
Beth Caldwell's family in Toledo, Wash., called every day for two weeks to see whether she had any news. In early March it came. Caldwell, a 23-year-old nursing student at the University of Portland, learned she was one of the first Providence Scholars.
She would join a program that will provide 75 of the university's juniors each year with full-tuition scholarships for their final five semesters of nursing school. In exchange, they must work for Providence Health System for three years after graduation, primarily at its three Portland-area hospitals, which employ about 3,000 nurses. Caldwell's parents, who pay her tuition, were thrilled.
³They just finished putting my sister through nursing school,² Caldwell said. ³My brother's starting college next year.² The partnership between Providence and the University of Portland aims at a nursing shortage that is expected to increase dramatically as aging baby boomers require more care. At the same time, an aging nurse population is beginning to retire in droves.
The average age of a registered nurse in Oregon is 48, said Deborah Burton, executive director of the Oregon Center for Nursing.
According to statistics from the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, Oregon will need as many as 2,683 more nurses by 2005 and 6,199 more by 2010. In 2002, 760 students graduated from Oregon's 21 nursing programs.
If the number of graduating nurses doubled by 2008, the state would still be about 20 percent short, Burton said. ³I was really, really worried about how we were going to take care of patients,² Kathy Johnson, Providence's nurse executive for Oregon, said during a ceremony to honor the scholars Wednesday at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center.
Johnson's worries followed her last spring to the Caribbean, where she vacationed with her daughter. Johnson said her daughter, Gretchen, an Intel engineer, listened to her ideas about how to retain and recruit nurses. ³Oh, Mom, you're just thinking way too small,² her daughter responded. She described how the high-tech industry grew its work force by aggressively partnering with schools.
When Kathy Johnson returned to Portland, she asked Terry Misener, dean of the University of Portland's School of Nursing, what it would take to provide Providence with 200 nurses a year. Misener said the school would need clinical sites, clinical instructors and ³it would not hurt if we could assist with tuition,² Johnson recalls.
She immediately agreed to furnish sites and instructors. And after consulting with the Providence finance department, she came back with a multimillion-dollar proposal to finance scholarships for 75 juniors a year. The health care company, which owns 17 hospitals from California to Alaska, pays 75 percent of students' tuition for the final five semesters. The university picks up the rest.
For Providence, Misener said, ³This is good business. This is not charity.² Research shows it can cost more to recruit and orient nurses than to pay their first-year salary, he said.
Providence's commitment of $2.5 million in scholarships to each new crop of nursing students appears to be the largest of its kind in the country, Johnson said. The company plans to continue the program for six years. Enrollment has doubled in the University of Portland School of Nursing from two years ago, when it admitted 70 juniors, Misener said. With help from Providence, the school accepted 150 juniors for the 2003-04 academic year. With tuition running about $21,000 a year, the program is a huge savings. The big benefit for Jeni Schiewe will come after graduation.
³I won't have $70,000 worth of debt,² she said.
Reprinted with permission of the Oregonian.