The Rural Nursing Gap is Real. WSU Nursing Helps Close It
Image via WSU Tri-Cities Flickr
Across America, people in rural areas are struggling to access basic medicine and care. Hospital consolidations have led to the closure of smaller clinics and the increasing cost of living means nurses and other medical professionals can’t afford to live in areas where the pay isn’t competitive.
“During the last decade for example, nearly 200 rural hospitals stopped providing obstetrics,” according to the Rural Community Assistance Corp (RCAC). These changes directly impact the levels of patient care and the experience of people living in smaller towns. “They either must travel outside of their communities for adequate healthcare or go without treatment completely if traveling the distance is not a viable option.”
This shortage frequently results in longer, more exhausting hours for the workers who remain in these areas, which can further compromise care.
The answer? More nurses graduating with higher skill levels and less debt. Ideally, many of these individuals would themselves be from rural backgrounds and want to live and work in those areas.
That’s where WSU comes in.
With a growing portfolio of accredited programs, the WSU College of Nursing has become a resource for Cougs and the community at large. Every year, more than 1,000 new medical professionals enter into our community from the WSU College of Nursing. They graduate with a comprehensive, well-rounded, and career-ready education - and many of them take those skills back into their communities, including rural areas of our state.
In addition to hands-on, innovative educational approaches, WSU is also deeply invested in ongoing public health research. According to the WSU College of Nursing, the school’s “nursing research addresses some of the most important issues in healthcare today, such as addiction, health equity and smart health.”
Part of filling the nursing gap is also reducing the overall cost of a college degree. WSU is working with a national organization with the goal of making a college degree more affordable and meaningful. This will impact the College of Nursing as well, and make nursing in rural areas a more feasible career for students.
Nursing has become such a vital part of the WSU system. Nursing students have provided care for thousands of members of the community; consider the hundreds of COVID tests that WSU Nursing students administered in Spokane at the height of the pandemic. WSU Nursing students were also deployed to area homeless shelters to administer vaccines to the most marginalized members of our community. This is not only a powerful learning experience for students, it also benefits our greater public health.
But WSU College of Nursing has also encountered rising costs and is in need of investment from our state government. As WSU Government Relations wrote in their summary of the 2023 legislative agenda, “WSU is requesting $4.4 million to support the College of Nursing’s reaccreditation effort. The university used reserve funds to temporarily cover the cost of salary enhancements to improve that standing to 50th percentile of peer institutions and 50th percentile of nurses with similar credentials.”
This year, WSU is asking the state to fund those enhancements on an ongoing basis to ensure that this work can continue. The WSU College of Nursing provides so much meaning and benefit to our communities - and our neighbors should be able to rely on their ongoing support.
