By Zane Josie
A new $200K commitment to nurse educators shows the dedication of the healthcare staffing company, Health Carousel, to long-term solutions to the nursing shortage. Can they help solve a long-standing problem that caused 80,000 qualified nursing candidates in the US to get rejected in 2019 (American Association of Colleges of Nursing) because schools can’t hire enough nursing teachers to educate the next generation?
Global nurse staffing company Health Carousel seeks to make a dent in it by investing significant money over three years, explicitly earmarked for advanced nursing degree scholarships in the US and Philippines. This new commitment is part of a larger Light the Way Initiative that has helped hundreds of nurses seek advanced nursing degrees since its inception in 2004.
Light the Way Continues to Advance Nursing Education
Health Carousel‘s Light the Way Program has already provided hundreds of scholarships to nurses seeking post-graduate nursing degrees, as well as supporting sustainability and ethical recruiting in nursing.
Light the Way gets its name from Florence Nightingale. She was known as the “Lady with the Lamp” and the “Founder of Modern Nursing”. During her time, she is said to have traveled by lamplight late at night to console and aid wounded soldiers.
Health Carousel is consulting with school administrators on how best to manage the scholarship, and they’ve named Chamberlain University as their preferred partner for the nurse scholarship program in the US.
While the Light the Way program previously set aside scholarships for nurses seeking advanced degrees, this new commitment specifically seeks to increase nurse educators.
Typically, someone who enters a nurse educator program is already a skilled nurse with years of real-world experience wishing to follow a new nursing path to inspire, mentor, train, and lead aspiring and rookie nurses.
The program seeks to not only support a nurse who wants to teach others but to indirectly yet meaningfully impact patient care as a whole. Training even one educator has the potential to increase nursing school capacity to get thousands of more nurses through nursing programs over the following decades.
This represents a significant financial and administrative undertaking to target a problem that has been culminating over the last couple of decades but got even worse due to the pandemic’s toll on healthcare workers.
More About Health Carousel
Health Carousel is the 17th largest healthcare staffing company, providing a variety of healthcare management, recruitment, and placement services in the US and internationally. Given their broad perspective, they’ve been able to see that the nursing shortage is a US problem and shared by many countries around the world.
Their latest commitment via Health Carousel Philippines demonstrates they understand we’re in this together. It’s vital to act now because as our population ages, we’ll see an even greater mass exodus of retiring nurses coupled with increased numbers of older patients who need nursing care.
